Meanwhile, the trading volumes across the crypto’s main instruments dropped by nearly 100% in the same period.
PEOPLE, ConstitutionDAO’s governance token, has climbed in value by nearly 200% in just 24 hours despite falling transaction volumes during the same period, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
The cost to purchase 1 PEOPLE token surged to $0.0321 compared to $0.0110 24 hours ago. In contrast, its trading volumes across the crypto exchanges dropped by almost 100% to over $181,000, reflecting that the ongoing bullish move had very little support behind it.
The story so far
The massive bullish momentum in the PEOPLE market came at a time when users had to ditch it for the native Ethereum blockchain token, Ether (ETH).
That is primarily because ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), crowdsourced over $47 million in Ether via the sale of PEOPLE. It wanted to use the proceeds to buy a rare copy of the United States constitution but lost its bids to billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin at a recent Sotheby’s auction.
Left with no Constitution and $47 million worth of ETH funds in its multi-signature wallets, ConstitutionDAO decided to refund the entire amount to its donors. But many in the DAO’s Discord community stressed that they did not want to pay the high refund gas fees.
In response, the ConstitutionDAO team offered two choices to their donors: either they could return their PEOPLE tokens for ETH (minus gas fees), or they could choose to receive a new governance token, dubbed We the People (WTP ), without having to pay a gas tax, at the rate of 1 PERSON per WTP.
Meanwhile, in the event of donors not choosing to demand refunds, ConstitutionDAO will retain the capital.
As a result, DAO will be able to keep part of ETH in its coffers as long as donors convert their PEOPLE to CAP or ignore any reimbursement. So if the value of ether increases, the price of CAP will likely increase in tandem.
Therefore, the ongoing PEOPLE price rally is hinting that traders have been either choosing to hold it or buy it from the secondary markets to get a hold of the WTP token at a later stage.
Juicebox a clear winner
ConstitutionDAO has not disclosed any specific reason why it wants donors to refund their PEOPLE tokens through a new governance asset, given that it has previously announced that it will close its doors after failing to win the rare copy of the American constitution.
David Gerard, author of the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and a news blog of the same name, noted that Juicebox.money, another DAO that processes payments for ConstitutionDAO, typically collects 5% of all the money made by the project.
As a result, Juicebox may have already made at least $ 2.35 million from the ConstitutionDAO crowdfunding and could earn more from upcoming WTP-funded ventures, if any.
“Not too bad a payday,” wrote Gerard.
For now, the outgoing ConstitutionDAO team has announced that lead contributor Brian Wagner and web 3 expert Liminal Warmth will be the new project leaders.
Meanwhile, the community has been voting on how it could deploy its Ether-backed WTP reserves on other projects, with its ideas ranging from pursuing a copy of the Bill of Rights to making a new Web 3.0 constitution from scratch.
