KEY POINTS
- Assange's wife, brother, and father are among the confirmed speakers at Plan B in October
- Assange's family will talk about the global significance of freedom of speech
- A Bitcoin whale covered $494K of the WikiLeaks founder's $520K chartered flight debt
Prominent activist Julian Assange's recent release has enlivened the spirit of advocates for freedom of speech, including stablecoin giant Tether, which announced Tuesday with the Swiss city of Lugano, the line-up of influential people to headline the third Plan B forum – this year, Assange's family members will speak at the event.
Assange's arduous road to freedom
The 52-year-old editor and publisher started publishing thousands of confidential U.S. documents on the WikiLeaks whistleblowing website in 2010. Free speech advocates championed his courage to release the files, while others deemed his actions endangering U.S. security and intelligence.
He was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts in relation to his work on WikiLeaks. He was in London's Belmarsh prison for five years while fighting extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges.
He finally landed back home in Australia late in June following a plea deal that sentenced him to time already served, ending his 14-year battle with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Freedom of speech at Plan B
Tether said in a statement Tuesday that Assange's family – his wife, Stella, his brother, Gabriel Shipton, and his father, John Shipton – will speak at the forum to address "the profound significance of freedom of speech and the far-reaching implications it holds worldwide."
The Plan B forum, which will run from Oct. 25-26 in Lugano City, Switzerland, will feature events and insightful panels focusing on the importance of finance democratization through broader cryptocurrency adoption.
Assange and the crypto space
Back in 2014, Assange spoke about Bitcoin, calling it "probably the most interesting intellectual development on the internet." He noted how the world's first decentralized digital asset is very different from "online currency" since it can "defend itself or the people who use it against even the full might of a superpower."
@JulianAssange_ explanation of #Bitcoin in 2014, truly ahead of the times. This talk was one of the first things I saw about cryptocurrency.
— Ivano Panetti (@ivanopanetti) June 25, 2024
Extremely glad he is free! pic.twitter.com/KOIz2W0GbJ
Soon after his wife asked for donations to help pay off Assange's staggering $520,000 chartered flight debt to the government – he was forbidden to fly commercially – an anonymous $BTC whale sent 8.21 Bitcoin to the wallet Stella provided for crypto donations.
At the time, $BTC was trading at $61,800, meaning the donation's dollar value was at around $494,000, covering most of Assange's home flight costs.
The donor's identity is a mystery in the crypto space, but many have suggested that it could have been Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder, who posted "safe passage through" on X around the same time the donation was made.
Other confirmed speakers
Among the other prominent names who will speak at the forum are Bitcoin maximalist and former Blockstream executive Samson Mow, OCEAN chairman and CTO Luke Dashjr, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, and Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark among others.
Tether has been working with Lugano on the Plan B initiative to make $BTC and Tether ($USDT) the de facto legal tender in the city, while also encouraging wider crypto adoption and global awareness around digital assets.
