ConstitutionDAO Fails To Win Sotheby’s Auction For US Constitution
A week old ConstitutionDAO that was founded to raise money to buy an original first printing of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s auction. It manage to raise over $45 million in Ethereum but failed to win the auction, which caused confusion in the industry.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) – ConstitutionDAO – has failed in its bid to purchase the last privately owned, 1st edition print copy of the U.S. Constitution at public auction at Sotheby’s on Thursday.
Sotheby’s auctioneer Quig Bruning started the Constitution copy’s bidding at $10 million. The bidding quickly jumped to $30 million and slowly escalated to a final bid of $41 million. Unfortunately, the DAO did not place the final bid and another bidder won the copy of the Constitution.
The specific copy is one of just thirteen copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution from the Constitutional Convention. It was first purchased from Sotheby’s by the late real estate developer S. Howard Goldman in 1988 for $165,000. His widow Dorothy Goldman put it up for sale this year and decided that the proceeds will go to the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation.
Project participants began to band together just a week ago as a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to pool funds for the auction. In the hours leading up to the sale, ConstitutionDAO had raised over $49 million in Ethereum donations collected via Juicebox, a platform for community-owned Ethereum-based projects.
According to ConstitutionDAO’s website, all 17,434 contributors who donated to the DAO’s mission, regardless of status, would receive a governance token PEOPLE in exchange for their donation. The governance tokens were meant to be used as voting chips, allowing all of ConstitutionDAO’s contributors to vote on future potential matters such as where the document should be housed and preserved.
