ConstitutionDAO to Shut Down and Refund Contributors Their Ethereum

By Kate Irwin

After five days of uncertainty, the decentralized autonomous organization ConstitutionDAO announced today it will be shutting down operations, turning its Discord community to read-only and leaving its Juicebox funding portal open only for contributors to claim refunds.

“We believe this project has run its course,” the ConstitutionDAO website now states.

The DAO was formed earlier this month with the goal of purchasing a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, which was auctioned by Sotheby’s on November 18. Despite raising over $45 million, the DAO failed to win the auction, losing out to anti-crypto Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. Many observers were frustrated during the auction because the DAO’s core contributors did not communicate the bidding strategy or even who was bidding on behalf of the DAO.

Today, DAO representatives shared on Discord and Twitter that they don’t have the bandwidth to pivot the community of over 17,000 contributors into a new project, as some have proposed.

“We have determined that building and maintaining an ongoing project is not something that we as a core team are able to support, given the technical and administrative requirements of doing it properly,” a DAO representative said via Discord. 

The community has been in a state of unrest since the auction loss, with many vocal in the Discord server making suggestions for the future of the DAO. In the wake of defeat, some contributors demanded refunds immediately, while others did not want to pay Ethereum gas fees again in order to be refunded, preferring that the DAO did something else with that money instead.

Things had looked hopeful for a moment over the weekend when the DAO’s core contributors appointed two new leaders to take over and spearhead the future of the group. But now, ConstitutionDAO will become a relic of the past, just like the document it failed to purchase.

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