About this episode

The episode explores the intersection of crypto technology and museums through the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the U.S. Constitution.

In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology. While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust. Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to…

People in this episode

Host: Ian Elsner

Guest: Nik Honeysett

Topics covered

• crypto technology
• museums
• decentralized autonomous organizations
• blockchain
• provenance
• institutional trust

Keywords

• ConstitutionDAO
• blockchain
• smart contracts
• museums
• provenance
• trust
• historical accuracy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ConstitutionDAO, Balboa Park Online Collaborative

Books & works: U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, National Treasure

Places: San Diego, New York

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