It’s said that “even a broken clock is right twice a day” – but if it’s an NFT, it’s not that simple. From incorrect numbers to numbers that freeze and then restart from zero, AssangeDAO’s Clock NFT has seen it all. And now it’s custom-built home has disappeared from the internet. If anyone knows why, they’re not saying.
Auctioned by AssangeDAO in 2022 to raise funds for Julian Assange’s legal defense, the Clock NFT was designed to count the number of days that Assange had been in prison following his arrest on April 11, 2019. To mark the one thousandth day that Assange spent in Belmarsh prison, campaigners protested Assange’s imprisonment. As a prelude, the NFT’s artist Pak tweeted the 999th day of Assange’s imprisonment. On January 6th 2022, the thousandth day, WikiLeaks‘ Twitter account posted a teaser for what would be revealed as the Clock NFT. On February 2nd, AssangeDAO posted on Substack that the auction would be held on the 7th, just over a month after the Clock NFT was first previewed in WikiLeaks’ tweet.
On February 3rd, AssangeDAO launched and began accepting donations. Before the auction began on February 7th, the DAO had already raised $40 million to bid on the Clock NFT. The Courage Foundation explained how the NFT was supposed to work, and why it was supposed to be more resilient than “some so-called JPEG NFTs.”
The code for the NFTs will be contained within the Ethereum blockchain itself. This means that the computer code that generates the artwork exists on the blockchain and can therefore not be manipulated, corrupted, removed, or censored. This ensures data permanence and avoids the problems associated with some so-called ‘JPEG’ NFTs that rely on links to external servers.
Two days later (thirty two days after Pak and WikiLeaks observed Assange’s one thousand days in Belmarsh), the auction ended and AssangeDAO bought the NFT for 16,593 ether or roughly $52.7 million USD ($72 million AUD). The auction was held on Censored.Art, a website specially built by the NFT’s creator, Murat Pak, to serve as the home of the NFT, where it would be displayed and people could see how long Assange had spent in prison. Hours after the auction ended, Censored.Art showed a version of the Clock NFT that appeared to have stopped working.
Censored.Art and the Clock NFT incorrectly displayed One Thousand One Hundred One and remained unchanged at least until the end of May. This would incorrectly put Assange’s arrest on February 2, 2019 instead of April 11th. In late June, it increased to One Thousand One Hundred Ninety Six (incorrectly placing Assange’s arrest at March 13th), where it stayed at least until late July. Several days later, the Clock listed the correct number for at least one day. The problems with the website and the Clock NFT didn’t go entirely unnoticed by AssangeDAO. In August, the link to Censored.Art was unpinned from AssangeDAO social media and by October 2022, members of the DAO were asking “What has happened to our Clock?“
While one AssangeDAO member asked what happened to the Clock NFT, another responded that the count in the infobox below seemed to be accurate. While the number they said it listed that day matches what it should be, many previous and subsequent archives of the page show that it matched the incorrect frozen number on the clock. As noted above, these numbers often exceeded Assange’s actual time spent in prison, rather than having frozen on an outdated number. One member of AssangeDAO described it as
an urgent issue. It should never have been unpinned from DAO social media as the public rely on it for accuracy. If there isn’t a strong rush to fix it immediately ASAP I will be very disheartened about how this DAO works as a team for Assange.
…
It is something the techs should be constantly monitoring, observing and safeguarding and now should do whatever is needed to fix. Im sure Julian would be less than impressed that 1) someone chose to unpin it 2) nobody has responded to this post to say they are already remedying this problem.
Zylo, one of AssangeDAO’s main developer’s, joined the discussion to say that the NFT itself was fine. The problem was the Censored.Art website that Pak had built for the auction and to display the Clock NFT. Apparently, there was nothing AssangeDAO could do. “It’s not an issue with the NFT at all it’s just a website display issue – Pak needs to do a minor update to censored.art.”
Notably, the AssangeDAO posts describe the issues with displaying the Clock NFT as general technical problems that extended to the OpenSea platform (which users can manually refresh). Reportedly, the Clock NFT did “not show anything on etherscan.” This is especially curious since the Clock NFT was previously archived on Etherscan at the link indicated, albeit with an incorrect number.
A month later, the Censored.Art website displayed a new number – One Thousand Three Hundred Sixty. It had been only 1,308 days. This pattern of updating and freezing continued until March 2024, when it froze for the last time at One Thousand Seven Twenty Eight. Censored.Art would remain this way at least until it was archived for the last time in late August 2024, even appearing in Gabriel Shipton’s June 19 soft rug denial. During this last period of website activity, someone in the AssangeDAO Telegram chat someone asked about the value of the Clock NFT, which I responded to by pointing out the issues with the Clock NFT as shown on Censored.Art. I was banned from the chat, and those particular messages have since been deleted.
I had first brought the issue up in the general AssangeDAO chat as early as April 28th, and again a few days later in direct messages with one of the DAO’s volunteers. A month later, two AssangeDAO volunteers discussed it in a chat dedicated to the DAO’s governance. One volunteer, “Peter Tobias” advocated for fixing it, saying that it “doesn’t reflect well if that isn’t operational.” The other volunteer, “BZ,” echoed the words of Zylo a year and a half earlier by explaining that they need Pak to fix it. However, repeated attempts to contact Pak had failed. BZ added that the “NFT is a distributed asset that cannot be changed on the chain,” meaning that any problems were with the Censored.Art website. Despite what BZ said, a month later the NFT was ‘changed on the chain’ – twice.
On June 26th following his plea bargain, Assange returned to Australia. Several hours later, the contract controlling the Clock NFT and the rest of the Censored collection was modified. Half an hour later, it was modified again. (These are the only modifications that have been made to the contract since it was created.) The changes appear to have been made using the Censored: Deployer account, which Gabriel Shipton has said “is controlled by the Wau Holland Foundation, not AssangeDAO.”
Minutes after the second modification, Pak posted the “Unlocked” emoji on Twitter, prompting an almost immediate and vague response from Gabriel Shipton. (As of this writing, it is Pak’s most recent Twitter post.) The pair of contract changes had at least two known effects.
According to a 2022 post from AssangeDAO’s discord, the first change was always part of the plan. The open edition NFTs in the Censored collection had been locked to each wallet and impossible to trade, with the intention of unlocking them once Assange was freed. The two modifications to the contract accomplished this, as the first trades in the collection began later that day.
The purpose of the second known change remains unclear, and AssangeDAO has thus far declined to comment. Seemingly as a result of the contract changes, the Clock reset.
Observing the Clock NFT today requires going to sites like OpenSea or NFTScan, both of which allow visitors to refresh the NFT’s metadata and the image displayed. (Etherscan offers this as a Beta feature available to logged in users.) A comparison of archives made before and after refreshing the metadata shows that the Clock NFT has reset and is incrementing forward.
Aside from retweeting Pak’s tweet, AssangeDAO has not acknowledged or made any notification of the changes. A week and a half ago, I raised the issue on AssangeDAO’s forums. As of this writing, there have been no responses. When asked over Telegram, Michael, the sysadmin currently maintaining the AssangeDAO website and forums, said he has nothing to do with the Censored.Art website, and doesn’t know who does. There were no answers in the uncensored AssangeDAO chat, and messages about the issue to AssangeDAO organizers Gabriel Shipton and Silke Noa were left unread.
It remains unknown whether the pair of changes to the contract were intended to reset the Clock’s count, or if it was a mistake. If it was deliberate, the intention behind it remains unclear. Why this change wasn’t reflecting on the Censored.Art website before it went offline is also remains unknown.
Update: Three days after publication, Censored.Art was set to redirect to https://opensea.io/collection/censored-pak-assange/activity. The AssangeDAO website still links to Censored.Art/clock, which redirects to https://opensea.io/collection/censored-pak-assange/activity/clock and fails to load.
Five days after publication, a recording of a presentation given by Silke Noa the month before was uploaded to YouTube. In the presentation, Silke acknowledged some of the issues addressed here.
