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Cryptocurrencies saved Julian Assange, says his brother
Hours after Julian Assange pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a single charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, securing his freedom and concluding a 14-year legal saga around the world, the brother of the WikiLeaks founder expressed gratitude to the crypto community, stating his belief that cryptocurrency donations were saving Assange from a perpetually bleak future.
“I have no doubts about it [Julian] he wouldn’t be where he is now if the AssangeDAO community hadn’t been so generous and raised so much money to help his fight for freedom,” said Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother. Decipher Wednesday in an exclusive interview. “In short, she saved his life.”
AssangeDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization founded to help Assange’s legal defense, has raised about $53 million value of ETH in 2022 that he pooled to buy a Symbolic NFT. The proceeds from that sale were then donated to the Wau Holland Stiftung Foundation to finance Assange’s expensive legal fees and other expenses related to the publisher’s campaign for freedom.
Shipton said the massive fundraising push by the crypto community was a total surprise at the time, giving Assange the wherewithal to counter the US government’s efforts to punish him for leaking state secrets.
“It was an unexpected blow from the crypto community that I think caught the people who are chasing Julian by surprise,” Shipton said. “They thought they had succeeded in bleeding Julian dry, even bleeding our family funds.”
Shipton claimed that these crypto funds allowed Assange to not only launch an adequate legal defense, but also to build political momentum for Assange’s release through social media announcements and countless trips undertaken by family members (including Shipton) to lobby politicians in both Australia and the United States. .
“I’ve been on so many trips, flying to Washington and supporting Julian in Congress,” she said. “None of this would have been possible without AssangeDAO.”
Just today, Assange’s family received a Bitcoin a donation worth about $500,000 to cover Assange’s final travel and recovery costs as he pleaded guilty Wednesday in a remote U.S. territory in the Pacific.
The intimate connection between WikiLeaks and cryptocurrencies dates back to the origins of Bitcoin. In 2010, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto implored WikiLeaks not to accept BTC donations, fearing the integration would attract government scrutiny of the cryptocurrency.
When WikiLeaks was eventually blacklisted for accepting traditional payment methods, the nonprofit publisher of leaked documents began accepting BTC as a means to survive, providing one of the first stalwart use cases for online payments. -chain.
In 2017, Assange put to rest rumors that he had died while reading The last hash of the Bitcoin block during an online conversation.
Assange’s brother Shipton thinks it’s no coincidence that Assange’s path, and that of cryptocurrencies, have been so intertwined.
“To many people, to many innovators, to many technologists, [Julian’s freedom] it represents their freedom,” Shipton said. “He used technology, encryption and Internet architecture to disseminate truthful information.”
Assange landed in his native Australia on Wednesday evening local time, home for the first time in years.
After texting Assange today, Shipton said he thinks his brother feels very relieved now that he is reunited with his family and is sleeping in a real bed.