Investors Want To Buy US Constitution With $12M In Crypto

A group of internet friends and cryptocurrency investors started a joke that turned into a plan. They came together in a matter of days to form a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), ConstitutionDAO, with the goal of buying a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.

One of the 13 existing copies of the U.S. Constitution will go up for auction for the first time in 33 years at Sotheby’s on Thursday night.

Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and an investor in ConstitutionDAO, described a DAO on CNBC's "Fast Money" as “a group of people coming together around a shared mission, kind of orchestrated and governed by tokens and it looks an awful lot like, you know, a digital version of an LLC.”

Sotheby’s estimates the Constitution will go for around $15 million to $20 million. As of now, the group has raised over $12 million in ether, a transactional token or cryptocurrency on the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network is an open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality that is second to Bitcoin in market capitalization. ConstitutionDAO has a fundraising goal of $20 million.

McCormick said a reason the DAO is so impressive is that “it just shows people what’s possible and so it’s no longer just digital objects...”

Theoretically, a DAO could buy a company, real estate, and other assets with shared funds and shared governance, not just a copy of the Constitution.

If secured, Alice Ma of ConstitutionDAO, says the Constitution “will be owned by the DAO, which means that everyone who buys in, they get a portion of the governance token of the DAO and then they can then use that token to vote on where the Constitution should actually be custody.”

The group is already pooling together a list of museums they would like to see the Constitution in and everyone who buys in will then get to decide which museum will house the document.

To buy the Constitution, Ma says the plan "is to transfer everything to USD before paying their invoice." If the group does not win the bid “we have set up like a smart contract setup which basically guarantees that people can withdraw their funds from the contract if they so choose, they just give up their tokens.”