WikiLeaks Founder Says “I'm Back.” A Token Most People Forgot Existed Jumps 743%

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to X with a two-word post saying he is back. AssangeDAO (JUSTICE), the Ethereum token minted to fund his defense, then spiked 743% in 24 hours.

Most coverage called the gap a two-year absence. Assange corrected that himself, saying his last personal post came in 2018.

AssangeDAO Token Spikes on a Two-Word Post

8 years, polymarket. last tweet 2018. account then run by my defense campaign as @DefendAssange https://t.co/omXYwiimDT

— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) September 18, 2026

His defense campaign ran the account as @DefendAssange in the meantime. The silence therefore lasted eight years, not two. Assange has kept a low profile in Sydney since a 2024 plea deal freed him.

The volume jump tells the story better than the price. JUSTICE averaged under $800 in daily turnover over the past month. That figure reached roughly $231,000 during the surge. Liquidity stays thin in absolute terms, though.

Most of the trading ran through a single Uniswap pool, and the fully diluted valuation sits near $2.5 million. The AssangeDAO token also trades about 95% below its February 2022 record.

Traders have chased attention spikes like this before. A viral meme coin rally in August lifted one token 10,000%. BASECAT climbed more than 2,000% in a single day. Both moves faded quickly.

AssangeDAO launched in February 2022 to fund Assange’s legal defense. Supporters pooled 16,593 ETH, worth about $53 million then. They bought an NFT from the artist Pak. The Wau Holland Foundation later spent the proceeds on legal costs.

Bitcoin Kept WikiLeaks Alive After the Banking Blockade

Visa, Mastercard and PayPal cut WikiLeaks off in December 2010. The site therefore started accepting Bitcoin in June 2011. That move became an early test of censorship-resistant money.

Satoshi Nakamoto opposed it at the time.

“It would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us,” Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcointalk post.

Assange later credited those donations with keeping WikiLeaks funded. He claimed returns close to 50,000%. In 2024, an anonymous donor sent 8 BTC to clear his roughly $500,000 charter-flight debt.

That pattern has since repeated elsewhere. Crypto donations reached Venezuela within days of its June earthquakes.

JUSTICE therefore appears to trade on that history rather than on any fresh project development.