By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 25th, 2024
Despite the recent failure, a community-owned journalism network based on transparency and trust, Civil, will take another ICO chance in February 2019.
Civil, a community-owned journalism network based on transparency and trust, has officially announced its another launch in February. According to the blog post from Civil co-founder Matthew Iles, the team has taken into account all the mistakes of the platform’s October ICO, which ended up refunding contributions to those that supported it:
“In the days following our failed token sale, I met with every member of the Civil team, our newsrooms, partners, community members and close advisors, to understand what we needed to learn, what we needed to change, and critically, what we needed to hold onto.”
Despite having such a powerful media representative as Forbes in the list of its partners, Civil managed to raise only $1,435,491 in CVL tokens from 1,012 investors, while an additional 1,738 buyers registered for the sale, but never completed the transaction.
The Civil network represents itself a blockchain-based platform for journalism, which aims to create a new media ecosystem powered by its native CVL token, in order to help participants attain financial sustainability and improve trust in journalism. In this long description, the company puts the word “journalism” at the first place.
Initially, the platform was intended to become a decentralised network, which would bring back the true freedom of speech to newsrooms allowing them to reach their own communities by utilising some of the tools offered by the Civil media platform, as well as to raise support from their readers in the form of the platform’s native token.
As Matthew Iles noted:
“Civil was never about ICOs and tokens, or even blockchain. We’re about community-ownership, transparency and trust. We believe journalism (and media at large) should compete on craft, but collaborate on infrastructure. Technology is a critical means to an end, but we let it overwhelm our message, complicate our experience, and distract from our core objectives. We won’t make that mistake again.”
For its next token sale, which is planned to be launched in February, the platform will set no hard cap, no soft cap, or even time limits. Instead, interested members of the public will be able to buy tokens right from the company’s official website.
The new ICO will also come with some new elements – Civil Registry and Civil Publisher. The first one represents itself an app which allows any newsroom to apply for becoming a Civil newsroom. It will be a kind of subscription to a living constitution of journalistic standards, the so-called Civil Constitution. Civil Publisher, in its turn, is a tool, which lets Civil newsrooms index verifiable data about their articles on a blockchain or permanently archive their work on a blockchain.
At the moment, Civil network include 18 newsrooms among its ranks with a total readership near 10MM people. More than 50 additional newsrooms are preparing to join for the platform’s February launch.