How Julian Assange’s brother and a crypto artist raised $74m to free him

Gabriel Shipton didn’t know his older sibling at all when he was growing up. In fact, he didn’t even know Julian Assange existed until he received an email in his last year of high school saying: “this is your long-lost brother”.

“I thought it was a joke,” says Shipton, a rangy, academic-looking 42-year-old film producer. “So I sent an email back saying, ‘Oh bullshit’. And he sent one back saying, ‘Ask your dad’.”

Gabriel Shipton at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.Credit: Simon Schluter

So he did, and John Shipton readily came clean about the relationship he’d had with a woman when they were in their early 20s, and the child it produced. Soon after that, the siblings – Assange in Melbourne, Shipton in Sydney – connected in real life.

“He would come and visit, stay with me when I was living in sharehouses and things like that,” Shipton says. “We were immediately pretty close. I didn’t have any other siblings, so it was a nice surprise to find out I’ve got an older brother.”

The bond between them took on another dimension when Assange was arrested in 2019, after the Ecuadorean embassy in London revoked the asylum it had extended to him since 2012.

A couple of months after Assange’s arrest, Shipton, their father and investigative journalist John Pilger visited him in Belmarsh prison. And what they saw shocked them.

Shipton with Assange’s wife, lawyer Stella Assange, outside court in London last year.Credit: AP

“I’d been visiting him in the embassy over the years, and he always had it together, even though there was intense pressure on him,” Shipton says. “I’d never seen him in a state like that. He was very distressed, and I left Belmarsh that day thinking, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to do everything I can, otherwise Julian might lose his life’.”

From that moment came two major pieces of work that ultimately helped pave the way for Assange’s release in June 2024: the documentary Ithaka, released in November 2021, and a collaboration between Shipton and the digital artist Pak that ultimately raised $US55 million ($74 million in February 2022) towards the legal campaign to free Assange.

Pak is a suitably shadowy figure whose identity is unknown. A digital creator, cryptocurrency investor and programmer, they are perhaps the ideal collaborator on a project designed to aid the creator of WikiLeaks.

But while Shipton will discuss the Censored program at the Australian International Documentary Conference this weekend, don’t expect any insights into Pak.

“I never met him,” he says. “Actually, I don’t even know if it’s a him; I assumed it was a him, just from our conversations, but I never met him. Them.”

Shipton became intrigued by the potential of NFTs as a fundraising tool in 2021, soon after they emerged as an outgrowth of the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency.

A non-fungible token is a unique digital identifier of authenticity that cannot be copied, substituted or subdivided. Inscribed on the blockchain, it allows the artefact to which it is attached to be bought and sold.

Pak was an early mover in the space, and in three days in December 2021, their artwork The Merge generated $US91.8 million in revenue, from the sale of 250,000 NFTs that, when combined, coalesced into a single work. In all, 26,000 people owned a piece of the whole.

But when Shipton first reached out to Pak, the artist said they weren’t interested.

“They didn’t really want to delve into the political,” Shipton says. “So I started reaching out to other people, and then I came back to them, and they said they’d been thinking about this, thinking about censorship, and eventually had found a way where they could get involved, it made sense. They could see a pathway where they could create something that was in line with their mission, their vision as an artist.”

Pak created a collection under the rubric Censored. The central work was Clock, a simple digital counter that recorded how many days Assange had been in prison. Each day until he was released it would tick over. Upon his release, it reset to zero; since then, it has counted off the days he has been free (albeit with certain restrictions and the risk that he could be re-arrested for failing to comply with them).

In February 2022, Clock was sold to a consortium of about 10,000 buyers – known in crypto speak as a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) – for 16,593 ETH (the cryptocurrency ethereum), equivalent to $US52.7 million. That money went into a trust in Germany, for the explicit purpose of facilitating Assange’s freedom. (Shipton says about $US11 million is left, and none of it can be used to support Assange’s day-to-day life in a remote location on the NSW coast, where he now lives with his wife, Stella, and their two children.)

A secondary element of the project allowed people to generate their own works – simple text-based slogans – for a fee. That project raised $US2.1 million more, most of which was donated to Ukraine. While Assange was incarcerated, the NFTs weren’t tradeable, but now they are. Clock is still owned collectively by the DAO.

The project, says Shipton, was similar to film producing. “You’re combining the IP, which was Julian, the creative talent, in this case Pak, and the technical talent, those people who are working behind the scenes to create the tech pathway for this to actually happen.

“What’s different is there’s no gatekeepers – there’s no distributor, there’s no theatre owner – you’re directly connecting with people who are engaging with the work.”

As a film producer, Shipton can see applications of this beyond his brother’s unique set of circumstances. But not, perhaps, to every project.

“It doesn’t have to be a serious thing,” he adds. “It can be irreverent, it can be funny, it can be a meme. There is a big community out there, a lot of them are very wealthy now, and they’re anti-establishment.”

Gabriel Shipton will speak at the Australian International Documentary Conference at ACMI on Sunday, March 2.

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