Media startup Civil’s token sale fails to take off

The token sale that was meant to write a new chapter in the evolution of online journalism seems to have not taken off and the worst that was feared has come true. There was a certain sense of anticipation mixed with a tinge of uncertainty when Civil unveiled its ambitious plan to sell $8 million worth of its cryptocurrency, called CVL. But it seems that Civil’s initial coin offering (ICO), which was meant to fund a new economy of journalism based on blockchain failed to attract sufficient interest. This was announced by the company in a Medium blog post today. The sale began on September 18 and concluded yesterday. “The CVL token sale didn’t succeed. We’re disappointed, but we’re as committed as ever to seeing Civil out in the world. A new, much simpler token sale is in the works. We’ll be sharing details on that soon. 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,” says the blog. According to Mathew Iles, 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. Civil will launch three new features once the tokens from the new sale are distributed.

• Blockchain-publishing plugin for Wordpress
• A community governance application (aka, The Civil Registry)
• A developer tool for building with Civil data without blockchain expertise

According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, Civil’s attempt to forge a new kind of journalism failed to incite much interest in media bigwigs like The Washington Post, New York Times, and Dow Jones among others. It is worth recalling that earlier this month, Forbes became the first major media organization to commit to publishing content on the blockchain. The leading international business media outlet entered into a partnership with Civil to publish its content on a decentralized network. Speaking about the partnership, Salah Zalatimo, Senior Vice President of Product & Technology at Forbes said, “We are relentlessly focused on rapid experimentation and implementation so that we can determine what’s in the best interest of our audience and what is next for our industry.” See Also: Forbes partners with Civil to try its hand at blockchain Brave Partners with the Dow Jones Media Group Image via Shutterstock Join our Telegram group