Civil Pulls Plug on ICO After Falling Short of $8 Million Softcap

Journalism startup Civil is pulling the plug on its much-hyped Initial Coin Offering after it met only 13 percent of its fundraising target.

As reported by Fortune, the startup closed sales of its CVL token on Oct.15 after drastically failing to come close to the $8 million minimum target sought by its founders.

Civil runs on the Ethereum blockchain and aims to provide crowd-sourced journalism that is free of political agendas and monopolist sentiments.

The partnerships and potential use cases have failed to stir up interest in the Civil protocol, presumably as an adverse effect of the prolonged bear market the cryptocurrency sector is facing in 2018.

Civil received a seed funding from Ethereum incubator ConsenSys Labs in 2017 and has since operated on the initial capital.

It sought $8 million - $24 million via ICO to further enhance its product and create a strong contender in the journalism space.

As funding efforts failed to clear the minimum threshold, Civil shall "Automatically refund" all participants who purchased the $1.2 million worth of CVL tokens by Oct.29.

Just five days before the ICO close date, the project had raised close to $1 million - indicating reaching the soft cap was a mammoth task within a short while.

Another faltering sign was the lack of interest from Civil has been making efforts to attract credible companies to use its product on their publications.

Recently, a Wall Street Journal article noted Civil had approached several agencies, including The Washington Post, Dow Jones, and New York Times for partnerships, to no avail.