Last November, the sale of a copy of Constitution turned heads when a group of crypto enthusiasts started crowdfunding ConstitutionDAO with a winning bid to get the rare document. Now, a new, unaffiliated group under the name ConstitutionDAO2 aims to do the same for another copy of the Foundation copy when it goes on sale at Sotheby’s next week.
One of 13 known surviving copies of the first edition of the Constitution, the last in circulation more than a century ago, when it was gifted to rare book collector Adrian van Senderen. It is estimated to sell for between $20 million and $30 million, the highest estimate ever set for a historical document at a public sale. It will be presented at Sotheby’s New York headquarters on December 13.
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With the goal of raising public and private funds to submit the winning bid to purchase the print edition, ConstitutionDAO2 is made up of a group of 16 separate online organizations. They include Juicebox, Nucleo, Aztec Network, and MoonDAO, along with PeopleDAO, which oversees tokens originally produced by ConstitutionDAO. This group is now run by separate individuals, who remain anonymous.
The news comes a year after Citadel founder Ken Griffin first outbid a coalition of cryptocurrency investors, who raised more than $40 million from more than 17,000 buyers of the copy. Griffin won the lottery, which had long been owned privately in the estate of New York philanthropist Dorothy Tapper Goldman, and paid a final price of $43.2 million. After being revealed to be the buyer, the Republican financier and donor publicly raised skepticism about the populous DAO group’s approach — wondering if a “big decentralized group” could keep the rare document. He eventually lent it to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which was founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
The new group of cryptocurrency buyers appears to be recoiling from Griffin’s oversight ideas. The website’s mission statement reads: “Exclusive institutions and collectors control some of the world’s most important civic artifacts.” “We aim to place these artifacts within the Web3 decentralized governance model.”
The group said the purchase of the document was meant to be the stepping stone to “initiating a collection of civic artifacts that are entirely people-run”. And last year’s auction that prompted other DAO groups to stage has been called a “cultural moment.”
A website organized by the initiative said that if the auction is one, the document will be held under UnumDAO, a nonprofit organization. If the group is successful, the group’s statement says, donors to the public fundraising effort will have voting power to control sponsorship and presentation of the document. As of Wednesday, it had raised 27.8 ETH (about $34,000) in public contributions, though its mission statement says the group aims to protect the final amount it will raise before the auction. “We will use a mixture of public and private fundraising to mask the giving ammunition,” the website’s statement said.
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