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“To be honest, we had a tremendous amount of momentum purchasing the NFT, and then the momentum slowed down a lot,” said René Pinnell, one of Ulbricht’s childhood friends who now serves as the “operational lead” for the DAO. We will share Ross’s work with the world and give everyone a unique opportunity to own a piece of it.” At the moment, the DAO is trying to figure out exactly how it can continue trying to do all that. The DAO’s manifesto spells out three goals: “1. But what, exactly, was supposed to be Step 2?Īfter the rush of excitement from winning the auction, the FreeRossDAO was in the awkward position of figuring out what to do next. So Step 1 succeeded: The RossDAO had successfully transferred $6 million to Ross Ulbricht’s family to fund their cause.

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But can a DAO really free a man from prison? On paper, it sounds like a powerful tool for egalitarian grassroots movements. Crypto evangelists say that DAOs obviate the need for centralized leadership and allow organizations to operate from the bottom up, with everyone’s input.

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Another group known as the SpiceDAO raised funds for a winning $3 million bid on a manuscript for filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed adaptation of Dune in November, though subsequent ambitions to make it into an animated series seem destined to fail due to the members’ evident misunderstanding of copyright law. Constitution at an auction, only to be narrowly outbid at the last second. Perhaps the most infamous was the ConstitutionDAO, which raised $47 million from 17,000 people late last year in an effort to win a copy of the U.S. As the notion of a crypto-powered Web3 has generated hype in recent months, DAOs have been popping up everywhere, for various purposes. A DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, is a group that uses shares of cryptocurrency tokens to divide ownership and decision-making among the holders. In December, thousands of people joined a Discord server to form the FreeRossDAO. Former President Donald Trump also reportedly considered pardoning Ulbricht in the last weeks of his term, but didn’t follow through.Īs Ulbricht’s path to freedom has narrowed, there’s now a community of people who think that cryptocurrency, the technology that Ulbricht used to run the site that would land him in prison, could also be the key to finally getting him out. In 2018, the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. “When I learnt about Ross, it was obvious to me that he does not deserve a double life time, it’s simply unjust.” Despite the persistence of the campaign and the publicity it’s enjoyed, Ulbricht’s case has hit a wall. And I witnessed how people’s lives are being broken in the result of the war on drugs,” she wrote over email. “I ended up in jail for a non-violent crime myself. A few celebrities have even gotten behind the cause, such as Pussy Riot co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova. “It’s just a horrendously excessive sentence for something where there was no violence involved,” his mother, Lyn Ulbricht, told me recently.

Ulbricht’s family, friends, and fans within the cryptocurrency community have helmed a years-long campaign to free him, arguing that the sentence was incommensurate with the crime. Prosecutors alleged that at least six deaths were attributable to drugs sold through Silk Road. Founded in 2011, the site amassed more than $200 million in total sales revenue before the FBI shut it down and arrested Ulbricht in 2013. Silk Road was arguably the first major use case for cryptocurrency, as transactions were conducted with Bitcoin in order to make them harder to trace.

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Ulbricht is currently serving two life sentences plus 40 years for founding and operating Silk Road, a dark web marketplace for drugs, fake driver’s licenses, and other contraband.