The Dune Bible Crypto Collective wants to sell their Dune Bible

The cryptocurrency collective built around a copy of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune script bible will no longer be a collective and is trying to sell its Dune Bible.

Spice DAO (short for Decentralized Autonomous Organization) recently started “Redemption Phase One”, a fundamental shift in direction. After a series of setbacks in an ambitious plan for a crypto-powered media studio, the group is allowing people who hold their $SPICE token to withdraw their money from the group’s treasury. It will change its name to the “Spice Club”, a “members only” rather than a body with a formal voting structure. And it will cut maintenance costs to a minimum, a process that includes handing over the fragile and valuable book that inspired its creation.

Members holding $SPICE can earn returns from Spice Club’s remaining initiatives. The group hopes to cash in on the sale of the book and a non-fungible token (NFT) collaboration with comic book artist Frank Miller. But that plan is complicated by the dismal state of the cryptocurrency market and legal questions surrounding DAOs and tokens like $SPICE, as well as doubts about whether the book can be auctioned for anything remotely approaching the roughly $3 million purchase price.

The group’s current plan includes the sale of Dune the Bible in the fourth quarter of 2023, coinciding with the release of the film Dune: Part Two. The group previously collaborated with comic book publisher Frank Miller Presents on an NFT series, which it still plans to help publish. Any remaining $SPICE owners may receive a portion of their treasury after these projects go live, although the legal language is somewhat rigid. In the Spice Club Discord, project manager Kortelin noted that the team was being cautious in anticipation of possible crypto regulation. Alternatively, they can “burn” $SPICE and withdraw 0.3 ETH, or about $450, per million tokens. The group’s treasury currently indicates that its net worth is around $1 million.

Spice Club was one of many crypto DAOs, but it was unusually ambitious. Began as a crowdfunding project to buy a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune bible, it ended up with a multi-million dollar treasury after winning an auction in November 2021. The DAO hoped to maintain the physical state of Dune book, find a way to scan and distribute its content publicly, and produce media similar to Jodorowsky’s never-made adaptation of Dune. So far, Spice Club managed the first of these tasks, paying for maintenance with its own funds. It also funded a competition to find stories that could be turned into a TV miniseries and paid for a script from Love, death and robots author Philip Gelatt. These projects as well as the Frank Miller NFTs were promoted by a small core team and then adopted by a vote of people who had purchased $SPICE tokens.

But in the months following the auction, the group encountered a number of problems – some predictable, some less so. It had trouble finding a way to make it Dune the Bible available to members without violating copyright law. The group also bought the Bible right before a dip in crypto prices that has since turned into a full-blown crash, decimating the treasury, which was largely held in Ethereum. Earlier this year, one of the founders resigned after being linked to a deliberately hateful online art project persona, prompting the project’s original figurehead Soban “Soby” Saqib to distance himself from the operation.

As part of the recent transition to the “Spice Club”, Saqib is withdrawing even more from the project, giving up access to the treasury.

Meanwhile, Kortelin indicated on Discord that the book had “no willing buyers” at the moment, though that may change before the planned sale next year. In any case, the book is unlikely to reach its original selling price – which was unusually high for an edition of Dune the Bible, possibly thanks to the hype surrounding the crowdfunding campaign.

“Really wish this worked better, the DAO delusion was at its peak when the community embarked on this journey together,” Saqib wrote on Discord after the liquidation operation began. “At least DAO makes people whole and doesn’t let hubris get in the way.”