New York-based Startup, Civil, To Issue Refunds For Failure Of Its Token Sale

By Kapil Gauhar

The New York-based startup, Civil aiming to put journalism on the blockchain, has declared that it will issue refunds for the users who took part in its token sale which failed to meet a pre-set minimal requirement.

The chief executive officer of Civil, Matthew Iles, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that the startup ended the sales process of its proprietary CVL tokens on October 15, which couldn’t reach the goal of collecting minimum $8 million.

After receiving a $5 million funding from Consensys, the ethereum startup, last year, Civil began its token sales on September 18 to raise funds in somewhere between $8 million to $24 million by October 15 in its bid to launch a blockchain journalism platform.

Since Civil has failed to cross the threshold, it said that participants would be able to request an immediate refund. Else, they will be refunded automatically by October 29.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Civil didn’t manage to bring in $1.34 million toward its minimum $8 million until October 10, five days before the deadline.

Probably, that fact made the refund announcement on Wednesday which is not entirely astounding. As, on October 10, Iles said in a blog post, “The numbers will show enough that we are not where we wanted to be at this point in the sale when we started out”.

A Wall Street Journal article stated that Civil had recently tried to pitch its blockchain-based platform to numerous major media, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones, without success. However, Forbes has recently declared its partnership with Civil to publish its content on a blockchain.

With that said, Civil is not giving up and is still looking to start another round of token sales before it can officially launch the platform.

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