500000 Bitcoin Donation Funds WikiLeaks Founders Return to Australia

An anonymous Bitcoin donor stepped up to provide approximately $500,000 (8 BTC) in funding to cover Julian Assange’s travel expenses.
Assange was released after reaching an agreement with the U.S. and pleading guilty to one count of breaching the Espionage Act.
The donation almost met the $520,000 target for Assange’s charter flight costs to Saipan and Australia.
Assange appeared in a U.S. District Court in Saipan, received a sentence of time already served, and is now free to return to Australia.
WikiLeaks has a record of using Bitcoin for donations after being blocked by traditional payment processors in 2010.
Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, is set to return to Australia as a free man after 14 years of legal battles against extradition to the United States.
This development comes after a plea agreement with U.S. authorities and an unexpected act of generosity from an anonymous Bitcoin donor.
On June 24, Assange was released from the high-security Belmarsh prison in the United Kingdom. He then traveled to Saipan, a U.S. Pacific territory, where he appeared in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands on June 26. There, Assange pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose secret U.S. national defense documents, a breach of the Espionage Act.
U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona sentenced Assange to five years and two months in prison. However, since he had already served this amount of time in the UK while fighting extradition, Assange walked out of the courtroom a free man. This plea deal allows Assange to avoid further U.S. imprisonment by acknowledging a lesser part of the extensive allegations against him.
The journey to freedom, however, came with a hefty price tag. Assange’s wife, Stella, revealed that the Australian government had charged $520,000 for the “forced” chartering of flight VJ199 to travel to Saipan and then to Australia. Stella Assange started a crowdfunding campaign to help cover this debt, stating that “freedom comes at a cost.”
An anonymous Bitcoin donor stepped forward to cover nearly the entire cost.
Within 10 hours of Stella posting the donation link, the unknown benefactor contributed just over 8 Bitcoin, valued at approximately $500,000. This single donation was larger than all other contributions combined and nearly fulfilled the entire fundraising goal.
The generous Bitcoin donation highlights the cryptocurrency’s role in supporting causes that traditional financial systems might hesitate to back. WikiLeaks has a history with Bitcoin, having started to accept it for donations in 2010 after conventional payment platforms like PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa blocked the organization’s access to funding services.
Assange himself has been an advocate for Bitcoin, publicly discussing his investments in the cryptocurrency and even mentioning a 50,000% return during a spike in Bitcoin’s value.
His early discussions with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, about using the cryptocurrency for donations have become part of crypto lore.
The use of Bitcoin in this instance demonstrates its potential as “freedom money” – a tool for bypassing traditional financial systems and supporting causes that might otherwise struggle to receive funding. The donation was processed through a BTCPay server, known for its robustness and resistance to censorship.
Following his court appearance in Saipan, Assange boarded a private plane to Canberra, Australia, arriving at 09:39 UTC on June 26. Thanks to the Bitcoin donation and additional fiat currency contributions totaling over £300,000 (about $380,000), Assange is likely to arrive in Australia debt-free.
This marks the end of a prolonged legal saga that has spanned over a decade. Assange, celebrated by many as a whistleblower and journalist but vilified by governments as a threat to national security, was responsible for one of the most significant information leaks in U.S. history. WikiLeaks published detailed logs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other classified documents.
As part of his plea deal, Assange acknowledged that encouraging sources to provide classified information for publication could be illegal. He is also required to destroy all classified information provided to WikiLeaks.