This week, and after a five-year legal battle, Juan Assange reached a deal with the United States that will avoid extradition and the 175-year prison sentence sought for him. Still There’s a road ahead For the founder of WikiLeaks, this means money. The private jet that takes him out of England is currently being paid for.

And the credit goes to an anonymous donor who transferred a whopping 8 Bitcoins to Assange’s account.

Australia organizes but does not payStella Assange is Julian’s wife and posted a message of help on X last Wednesday:

“Julian’s journey to freedom comes at a big price,” and it’s no joke: the $520,000 the family had to pay the Australian government for charter flight VJ199. Stella set up a donation site with a target of £520,000, claiming she was not allowed to fly to Saipan and then to Australia on a much cheaper commercial route. Therefore the flight was arranged by Australia but the amount needs to be refunded.

anonymous donor. At the time these lines were written on the donation site, 9 thousand 291 people donated 427 thousand 929 liras. But in the last few hours the surprise came in the form of a large anonymous donation to a cryptocurrency wallet for Assange.

One of the 32 transactions currently executed was for 18.24733691 BTC, which is $1,116,394 at the current exchange rate. Two wallets emerged, one containing $622,554 and Assange’s, the other containing 8 BTC worth $493,838.

Practically speaking, this anonymous donor (whose identity is being investigated and there is already speculation with Twitter creator Jack Dorsey) paid for the entire private jet. In total there is 8.21202527 BTC in this wallet, which is $502,421.

Assange and bitcoins. Considering the sensitivity of the topic and that Assange’s relationship with this cryptocurrency is not new, it is not surprising that one of the options is to donate via Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym under which the person or persons who created the bitcoin protocol are disguised, and at the beginning of crypto, Wikileaks had already established a payment channel with bitcoin.

They were banned from major payment platforms like PayPal due to pressure from the US government, and cryptocurrencies became a vital source of contribution.

New Campaign. As we said, although the five years he spent in prison mitigated the 62-month sentence for illegally disseminating classified information, there is still a long way to go and Stella Assange guarantees that she will seek a full amnesty from the United States. States. This is the guarantee of Julian’s freedom.

Moreover, this would be a gesture towards damaged press freedom, as the Committee to Protect Journalists has argued: “The US’s persecution of Assange sets a harmful legal precedent by paving the way for ‘Journalists to be prosecuted'” Confidential material from whistleblowers under the Espionage Act “If they do, this should never have been the case.”

Pictures | David G Silvers, Ladislav Mecir

On Xataka | DDoSecrets: This is the successor to Wikileaks, which has been leaking hundreds of GB of Russian data every day since the beginning of the war