‘The revolutionaries will be televised’: PleasrDAO Launching Live Auctions with Snowden, Ellsberg NFT

After purchasing a series of culturally significant artifacts, crypto investment collective PleasrDAO is now pivoting to host virtual live auctions with the creation of PleasrHouse, the group said Tuesday.

Its inaugural sale this Thursday will feature a non-fungible token (NFT) created in collaboration with Edward Snowden, political activist Daniel Ellsburg and The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was teased in a tweet by PleasrDAO saying, “The revolutionaries will be televised.”

PleasrDAO, a group of decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT traders, first made news in June 2021, when the group purchased a fraction of the popular Doge NFT for $4 million, which grew to a valuation of $225 million by September of that year. In 2021, it purchased fraudulent pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli’s sole-edition of the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album.

As the DAO is shifting to hosting its own sales of these items, Jamis Johnson, Chief Pleasing Officer at PleasrDAO, told CoinDesk that it aims to facilitate sales with on-chain transactions, affording users frictionless participation in the auction. In a press release, they described PleasrHouse as “a new experiment created to disrupt the shared experience of live art auctions,” and will focus on exploring the importance of unique art through interviews and other media.

The premier NFT on sale is titled, “Wouldn’t You Go To Prison To End This War?”, the words Ellsberg said just after he surrendered to officials for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The token features the video of the interview with the Pentagon Papers superimposed on it. Proceeds of the sale will be donated to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Daniel Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy.

“They were fighting for freedom of information being available to the public. And I think that that's kind of at the core of the ethos of crypto, is to not allow ourselves to be limited by the government, right?” said Johnson. “Those two concepts are very adjacent.”