Civil – ThirtyK

Project: Civil

Year of Founding: 2017

Founders: CEO/co–founder Matthew Iles; co–founders Lillian Ruiz, Matt Coolidge, Nguyet Vuong, Nicole Bode, Christine Mohan, Dan Kingsley, Julia Himmel

Industry: Media

Money Raised: $5 million from ConsenSys; public token sale begins Sept. 18

Website: civil.co

Calling itself a “decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism,” Civil is attempting to build a platform that can upend the advertising-driven revenue model that has wreaked havoc with the news industry since the advent of the internet. U.S. newspapers alone laid off about 25,000 journalists from 2005 through 2015.

Built atop the Ethereum platform, Civil allows readers to subscribe to, license or sponsor the work of independent journalists and newsrooms, in either fiat currency or cryptocurrency. Civil also provides an ecosystem where its own CVL token is used to ensure journalistic integrity, with users staking tokens as a pledge to follow ethical practices and to help ensure that other participants are doing the same.

Civil’s 14 inaugural newsrooms run the gamut from local news (The Colorado Sun, staffed by veterans of the layoff-plagued Denver Post) and investigative journalism (Sludge, covering the political system) to policy (Cannabis Wire) and international journalism (Popula, led by former New Yorker, Los Angeles Times and Village Voice journalists). August’s announcement the Associated Press would use its technology to license news content marks the introduction of mainstream media organizations to the platform. Also, its efforts to walk prospective token purchasers through the intricacies of how—and why—to buy CVL may help introduce a more mainstream audience, or at least news junkies, to the token economy.