For Edward Snowen, freedom of the press is worth 5 million dollars. He announced on Twitter the recent purchase of his NFT Stay Free. Who was involved in the purchase? How did he sell this NFT? What is the link between freedom of the press and crypto? What is the future of NFTs?
Edward Snowden is a 37-year-old American whistleblower. His original profession was IT. He is known for having denounced the presence of numerous American and British mass surveillance software programmes. As for crypto, the former whistleblower has already expressed an interest in this promising and profitable market in the past.
He sold his first NFT on the highly secure Fondation platform. This is a community marketplace where many artists offer their works for sale. On Twitter, he expressed his delight and thanked the investors, auction participants and members of the Press Freedom Foundation.
Defending and protecting press freedom
The Press Freedom Foundation is a non-profit organisation that defends freedom of expression and the rights of the press. Focused on financial support for these freedoms, the association includes the famous whistleblower. Edward Snowden is chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has also stressed that it will use this gain to continue developing technologies to help journalists and their sources and make them as secure as possible.
Secure Drop helped Edward Snowden create his NFT. Secure Drop is a free, open source software platform. As such, it ensures a secure exchange for journalists and their sources. Usually, NFTs are only used for speculative purposes. Snowden’s unusual decision is therefore innovative and beneficial to the cause of press freedom.
The NFT
NFT is an acronym for non-fungible token. In other words, it means that the token is unique and irreplaceable. These tokens are distinctly different from the many other tokens on the cryptocurrency market (BTC, LTC, XPR, etc.). There are more fungible tokens on the market, known as utility tokens, which are used for a specific service.
On the other hand, NFT is attracting increasing interest from cryptocurrency users. In fact, the ERC-721, based on Ethereum, is currently the most popular non-fungible token on the market. More generally, the more fungible a currency is, the more valuable it becomes. When a currency has a very specific use and is widely accepted by users, demand is even greater and so is its value. It’s also worth noting that when you create and generate an NFT, you can name it yourself. This is how Snowden named his Stay Free NFT.
Edward Snowden’s NFT
Edward Snowden’s NFT
The DAO
Concerned about the transparency of information circulating, Snowden is increasingly turning to decentralised and autonomous organisations. These are known as DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations), and are based on a decentralised digital currency. This is now the case for the vast majority of blockchain protocols on the crypto market. Decentralised networks include Ethereum, Bitcoin, Binance and the Litecoin blockchain.
PleasrDAO, the buyer of Snowden’s NFT
PleasrDAO paid the handsome sum of $5.4 million. PleasrDAO is a group based on the power of smart contracts used by many art collectors. This decentralised organisation bases its activity on investing in digital art. The members of this DAO are mostly anonymous. One of them recently said: “There are a lot of NFT sellers who are just in it for the capital; they just want to cash in on the NFT craze and resell in fiat” – “It’s not constructive for crypto-currency as a whole.”
PleasrDAO fully supports the famous whistleblower’s convictions. Indeed, the DAO bought the NFT from Snowden for the role he was able to play in the rules of transparency to the general public. It believes that his activities in exposing the NSA and its surveillance systems have contributed significantly to making information more transparent in a wide range of disciplines. This organisation and Snowden therefore form a fine alliance in terms of the causes they defend.
How PleasrDAO works
PleasrDAO distributes its properties in the form of tokens. Each member of the platform then receives a share of the assets created. Being a totally decentralised system, each of these members is an integral part of DAO governance and communicates via a group chat. If one of these members were to leave the platform, all its assets would be bought back and redistributed among the other members of the organisation. Following the purchase of Snowden’s NFT, PleasrDAO does not foresee any specific direction for its activities in the future. However, the organisation does intend to pursue its projects in art collecting, incubation and angel investment.
The future of NFTs
Many major investors and companies are still turning their attention to the NFT market. From Elon Musk to NBA teams, NFTs are piquing the curiosity of many new clients. More recently, it was PSG that decided to show its interest in these non-fungible tokens. The Parisian club has announced that it will be auctioning NFTs on 24 April. All are linked to several works by French artist Ludi. These NFTs are being sold for speculative purposes.
However, the Paris Saint-Germain Endowment Fund will receive half of the proceeds from the sale. This is an association dedicated to social, humanitarian, educational and sporting missions. PSG will be selling five of the artist’s virtual 3D animated figures on the specialist OpenSea platform. Other works will also be sold, for a total of 11 NFT. The auctions are open to all types of customer, who simply need to have an account on the platform offering them for sale.
More recently, IBM is also using NFTs in its activities. The American IT products company wants to produce its patents in the form of non-fungible tokens. NFTs would then be used to support patents and would no longer be reserved for video games and art collections. Digitising these patents could help the company and its partner IPwe to generate cash, which was not possible before. As well as generating NFTs, IBM also wants to be able to offer a service capable of buying and selling them.
