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Civil, a blockchain journalism startup which has partnerships with the Associated Press and Forbes, has officially announced that its token sale did not succeed, adding that it is now working on a “much simpler” token sale.
The CVL token sale, which kicked off on September 18, concluded on October 15. It had a soft cap of $8 million. In an online post dated October 16, Civil founder Matthew Iles said:
“Our token sale closed last night, and we didn’t hit the $8 million minimum that we set out to raise…We expected a different outcome when we launched the sale, but circumstances changed. We learned a lot of lessons which we will reflect on in the coming weeks and share with our community and the public.”
Speaking of the new token sale, Iles said it will precede the official launch of Civil, which is likely to take place in the forthcoming weeks.
“Buyers in the initial CVL token sale will be able to opt into this new sale, request an immediate refund, or be automatically refunded by October 29,” Iles said.
In October 2017, ConsenSys committed $5 million in funding to Civil – $2.5 million in capital and $2.5 million in services in support of Civil's newsmaking platform that enables a direct relationship between journalists and readers. TechCrunch reported that ConsenSys has agreed to purchase $3.5 million worth of those new tokens.
“ConsenSys has committed $3.5 million to the Civil Foundation, which will be used to fund existing grants to the 14 initial newsrooms as well as overhead. Future proceeds from the new CVL token sale will exclusively fund the foundation’s work, including its grantmaking,” Iles added.
According to the blog post, once the tokens from the new sale are distributed, Civil will launch new features including a blockchain-publishing plugin for Wordpress, a community governance application, and a developer tool for building with Civil data without blockchain expertise.
“Civil is not going anywhere. The Civil Media Company is here to stay,” Iles added. “The Civil Foundation, which was supposed to be funded by proceeds from the token sale, is up and running...The Civil Foundation will also still receive 100 percent of proceeds, net of taxes, from the sale of the 34 million CVL tokens once those go back on sale.”
