Crypto Bros Who Failed to Buy U.S. Constitution Would Like to Give You a New Token Instead of a Refund

Last week, ConstitutionDAO, the DAO that crowdsourced over $47 million to purchase a duplicate of the Constitution, suffered a poetically tragic loss to billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. They’d impressed meme traders and blockchain idealists and fell to the man accused of wiping out Robinhood customers’ Gamestop features, universally loathed by meme traders. Now left with no Constitution and a mountain of funds in a multisig pockets, ConstitutionDAO is staring down the unenviable job of probably processing over 17,000 refunds. And it has a (obscure) plan (type of).

Responding to the plenty on Saturday, the group tweeted that donors—lots of them evidently new to ether—can, as promised, refund their governance tokens (PEOPLE) for his or her authentic worth in ether, minus gasoline charges. Their subsequent transfer might in the end reveal whether or not this was as altruistic as over 17,000 donors hoped, with their median investments of round $200.

No information there, however right here’s the twist: ConstitutionDAO is launching a brand new governance token We the People (WTP), which donors can select to obtain as an alternative, proportional to the present worth of their PEOPLE tokens. Why compound the headache by launching a second token? That’s the $40 million+ query. ConstitutionDAO doesn’t provide many solutions, so we’ll have to invest.

Money could possibly be a cause for the brand new token, maybe. PEOPLE tokens signify no financial worth to donors; they merely signify voting energy to resolve what to do with no matter property the DAO collects. (In the case of the Constitution, that may have been institutional care and crafting the DAO’s mission.) Donors don’t obtain fractional possession of things acquired by the DAO, and so they aren’t anticipated to money in on any of the features from the elevated worth in PEOPLE tokens. They solely get refunds for what they donated, minus gasoline charges.

ConstitutionDAO retains no matter funds donors select to not demand again. Presumably, these funds will enhance over time with the worth of ether. The worth of PEOPLE has risen in latest days as a result of extra individuals bought (or acquired) PEOPLE in alternate for his or her donations.

If sufficient individuals transfer their ether to WTP tokens, the worth of WTP tokens presumably rises. Subsequent consumers need to pay extra to get their vote (or governance token).

Who makes cash from the elevated worth of WTP tokens?

One candidate is Juicebox, one other recently-launched DAO which processes funds for tokens for different DAOs, together with ConstitutionDAO. After some in-fighting over who ought to course of the refunds, ConstitutionDAO settled on Juicebox. As David Gerard has pointed out, Juicebox founder “Jango” can be one of many signers of ConstitutionDAO’s multisig pockets, which ConstitutionDAO didn’t disclose throughout fundraising. Juicebox usually collects 5% of “all money made by projects,” although a co-founder lastly tweeted lately that Juicebox had waived the charges for ConstitutionDAO’s final undertaking. (Are tweets about your cryptocurrency undertaking legally binding? ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

If Juicebox doesn’t waive charges for WTP-funded ventures, then this will likely have been precisely what it regarded like within the first place: a wildly profitable advertising and marketing marketing campaign to juice a crypto group in its infancy.

We don’t know whether or not they’ll, because of ConstitutionDAO’s normal caginess when requested for particulars. That began even with what the possession construction would appear to be in the event that they purchased the Constitution—in response to Gizmodo’s requests earlier than final week’s public sale, one of many multisig pockets co-signers merely stated that “after the initial purchase, the community will be able to restructure ownership to best reflect the mission and values of the DAO.” When requested follow-up questions a number of instances via varied channels, the DAO went silent.