Civil (CVL)

Basics

Started in: 2016
Closed down: 6-2020
Based in:

A spoke of Consensys. Is part of Consensys Labs portfolio
Supposed to create a more transparent and democratic model for journalism

Closed Down

From Decrypt (3-6-2020):

"Civil closed its doors today, with the website replaced by a blog post from CEO Matthew Iles about the decision.

The team and technology behind Civil has been folded into ConsenSys, the New York-based Ethereum incubator which backed Civil. The team will now work on Ethereum-based identity solutions going forward.

According to the site’s post-mortem interview, Civil has been on the path to closure for at least six months now. Along with key personnel departures, Civil also lost its primary funding from ConsenSys, the site reports, and couldn’t replace that funding."

Token

New-York based blockchain startup Civil announced it is issuing an $8M refund to its 3000 ICO investors; this comes after Civil failed to meet it $18M threshold and ultimately about 80% of Civil’s ICO funds, or $1.1M, came from ConsenSys; ConsenSys recently recommitted $3.5M to the Civil Foundation "which will be used to fund existing grants to the 14 initial newsrooms as well as overhead"
Civil told journalists on the platform part of their income would be in the form of CVL, the company’s own cryptocurrency; Civil canceled the launch of CVL last month due to low interest in the digital currency; a number of journalists say it’s unclear if or when they will receive what they’re owed UPDATE: token CVL has launched on 6-3-2019. "All the earnings from this ongoing token sale will go to the nonprofit Civil Foundation, led by former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. Participants from nearly 100 newsrooms joined the CVL community and Schiller took the helm of community growth last summer, thanks in part to additional token grants and fiat funding for the foundation from ConsenSys, the venture studio bankrolled by ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.

Civil Media also launched a membership program today with perks such as tickets to quarterly events, an exclusive newsletter and forum access where members can interact directly with journalists at participating news organizations.

All newsrooms are welcome to join as long as they own CVL and abide by the Civil Constitution of journalism ethics. Civil Media’s token curated registry is meant to allow stakeholders to challenge (or expel) unethical content creators or upvote trustworthy news sources.

Speaking to the distinction between the relatively new foundation, tasked with overseeing governance, and the Civil Media startup now providing software-as-a-service to both news outlets and readers, Iles said:“It’s absolutely our intention to start generating revenue as a for-profit company this year.”" So far, the CVL token is being used for membership – not payments on the network. In the meantime, Popula founder Maria Bustillos put her fiat Civil grant to work by hiring an independent developer and designer to enable ether tipping using ConsenSys’ in-browser MetaMask crypto wallet on Popula’s WordPress site. Popula’s freelance designer, Matt McVickar, told CoinDesk the crypto tips feature was still under development and is “certainly not ready for wider adoption yet.”

"Specifically, according to Cassano, Civil told reporters working with its sponsored news operations that the CVL token they would be partially paid in could be worth around $0.75. However, on tax documents, the tokens were valued at a fraction of a penny. Iles would not comment on that difference. “They kept hyping it up internally to keep us in line, saying they were even going to exceed that valuation,” Cassano said. “Iles, at one point, said he expected the tokens to double or quadruple in value compared to what was written in our contracts.”

A second Civil reporter, who still works at one of the newsrooms sponsored by the startup, told CoinDesk the startup’s leadership “absolutely” talked up the token’s growth potential to employees.

“The expectation was they were going to be able to get rich off of it,” the source said

Team

Matthew Iles, founder
Has a partnership with Forbes