Media Startup Civil to Issue Refunds as $8 Million Token Sale Fails

Civil, the New York-based startup aiming to put journalism on a blockchain, has announced it will issue refunds to users who participated in its token sale, as it failed to meet a pre-set minimal requirement.

Matthew Iles, Civil’s chief executive officer, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that the startup closed the sales process of its proprietary CVL tokens on Oct. 15, which was not able to reach the goal of collecting at least $8 million.

Having received a $5 million funding from the ethereum startup Consensys last year, Civil started the token sales on Sept. 18 to raise somewhere between $8 million to $24 million by Oct. 15 in its bid to launch a blockchain journalism platform.

Now that it has failed to cross that threshold, Civil said participants will be able to request an immediate refund, or “they will be automatically refunded by Oct. 29.”

CoinDesk reported early this month that Civil didn’t manage to bring in $1.34 million toward its $8 million minimum until Oct. 10, five days prior to the deadline.

That fact, perhaps, made the refund announcement on Wednesday not entirely surprising. As Iles said in a blog post on Oct. 10, “the numbers will show clearly enough that we are not where we wanted to be at this point in the sale when we started out.”

Recently, a Wall Street Journal article said Civil had tried to pitch its blockchain-powered platform to several major media including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Dow Jones, without success. Forbes, however, has recently announced a partnership with Civil to publish its content on a blockchain.

That said, Civil is still not giving up and is looking to start another round of token sales – “happening in weeks, not months”  before it can officially launch the platform.

“We’re also working on a new token sale process, very different from the last one and, we hope, much easier,” Iles wrote.

Newspaper image via Shutterstock

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