The Civil Token Sale’s Eleventh Hour

This isn’t how we saw this going — but our company and our community are pushing hard to make it happen. We don’t know if it will work.

This is an up-to-date report on the Civil token sale through early morning October 10, 2018. It also includes my commentary along the way in italics.

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. But one thing we want to say at the top is that until the clock strikes midnight on Monday, we are still working nonstop on the goal of making our soft cap of $8 million.

Important details:

• Sale dates: September 18 — October 15
• Total CVL tokens being sold: 34MM (out of 100MM total)
• CVL token price: ($ total contributed) / (34MM CVL tokens)
• Soft cap: $8MM, or $0.24/CVL
• Hard cap: $24MM, or $0.71/CVL

Key takeaways:

• 36,444 individuals have visited our website since the token sale’s September 18 start date.
• 681 individuals from 61 countries have completed their purchase, totaling $1,344,721.59. The oldest contributor is 83, the youngest is 16, and the most common age is 34.
• Another 1,671 individuals have committed another $798,503.71, but are either stuck somewhere in the process or simply haven’t decided to fulfill their commitment yet.
• All told, that’s 2,352 individuals committed to buy $2,143,225.30.
• The largest CVL purchaser to date is ConsenSys, which purchased $1.1MM in CVL tokens during two separate transactions in September — representing 82% of the completed purchase total, and 51% of the registered total.
• The Civil Media Company closed its first funding round from ConsenSys just over a year ago on October 2, 2017. ConsenSys is the world’s largest blockchain company, led by CEO Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum. They are Civil’s only investor to date.

We were founded to deliver a decentralized network for ethical journalism to the people, so nothing is more painful for our team than to witness how challenging it has been for motivated Civil supporters to wrestle with the user experience challenges involved with our unique consumer token product.

Here’s a look at how token buyers breakdown by purchase range:

It’s incredibly heartening to see so many people navigate our challenging process to contribute what they can. 45% of all buyers spent between $100 and $500 — more than most spend on journalism in total in a year, and a significant consumer technology purchase for most people as well. In many ways, this is the heart and soul of what Civil dreams to be!

Visualizing the Civil ecosystem:

There is a total fixed supply of 100 million CVL tokens. The Civil Media Company is distributing these tokens in three major ways, with the goal of building a decentralized network of as many mission-aligned participants as possible.

1. The Civil Media Company — As inventors of the larger Civil network, The Civil Media Company will retain 33 million CVL tokens (33% of the network) for employees, advisors and partners who have worked so hard to get us to this stage, as well as an unallocated reserve (or treasury) for both Civil Media and its sister organization, the independent non-profit Civil Foundation. Everyone receiving tokens in this manner is restricted from selling any CVL for a short period of time (in some cases, 3 months, and in other cases 6 months), with full unrestricted sale-ability coming between 2 and 3 years after the token sale. Personally, as founder and CEO of The Civil Media Company, I own 5 million CVL tokens (5% of total supply), but cannot sell my first token for one year and become fully unrestricted only after 10 years.
2. Key Partners — The Civil Media Company also set aside 33 million CVL tokens (33% of the network) for mission-aligned partners joining the network at launch. This includes the initial Newsrooms that formed on the Civil network (commonly referred to internally as the ‘First Fleet’) as well as major media and technology companies committed to growing the Civil ecosystem both in size and value. While partners such as Alley Interactive and Associated Press are included here and also face similar sale-ability restrictions on their CVL tokens, all First Fleet newsrooms are fully unrestricted on Day One for purposes of supporting their ability to transact within the economy more rapidly given they are early-stage organizations.
3. Public token sale — Finally, The Civil Media Company set aside 34 million CVL tokens (34% of the network) to sell to the public. Unlike other token sales, The Civil Media Company did not and does not need the proceeds from this sale in order to continue operations. We are backed by our investor, ConsenSys, and as a venture-backed for-profit company, will likely continue to fund operations via equity investment until such time that we can sustain ourselves via commercial activity. (We expect to generate our first significant revenues starting next year.) Instead, the primary goal of our token sale was to 1) distribute tokens to mission-aligned consumers and institutions, and 2) price the tokens fairly based on market demand. In fact, we pledged 100% of net proceeds from the token sale to the Civil Foundation in order to disperse grants to new and existing Civil Newsrooms and conduct original journalism research.

Here’s a look at the ecosystem to date:

Where the token sale (and Civil in general) goes from here:

We entered the top of the sale with the expectation we would close several large buyers in addition to ConsenSys in order to go the distance. There’s still time left in our sale, and we are feverishly working to get as many people (large and small) to complete the final steps to get their contributions in before it’s too late at midnight ET on Monday, October 15. We are still hopeful we will make our $8MM soft cap.

We will announce the complete details of the Civil token sale as well as the project’s next steps on Tuesday, October 16, and still intend to launch our token and our initial publishing and governance platform within one week.

We’ve often said that this is a grand experiment, and when you’re trying to do so many firsts, you’re bound to make mistakes or learn what works and what doesn’t along the way. This sense of evolution not just as a business but as a decentralized community is at the heart of what makes Civil so special. We will launch our publishing, licensing, governance apps and soon other products as well, all to further explore what’s possible in a world where journalists and citizens own and run a public forum for ethical journalism.

There’s still fight and future in us yet. Thank you to everyone who’s come with us thus far, and those who will continue to join us.

How you can help:

• Go to civil.co to buy CVL tokens if you want to help this experiment succeed.
• Go to civil.co/help if you need help completing your CVL purchase.
• Email support@civil.co if you need one-on-one help.