Banking confusion amid the growing business community of CBD entrepreneurs has meant an uphill battle for a promising market. Now, a decentralized solution to banking is helping CBD in a completely different way.
Blockchain technology was innovated by crypto anarchists in the 1990s and 2000s, but now CBD farmers are using the grassroots tech for their hemp harvests.
Companies like Treum and Verified Organic design software around the blockchain idea to help farmers manage metadata regarding their hemp harvests, replacing older apps and programs that they’ve found tiresome. [1]
According to Yahoo! News, Richard Phelps of Integrated CBD is one such farm manager.
The theory behind the blockchain is as simple as it is monumental. The concept revolves around using difficult-to-solve computer codes to maintain public ledgers of transactions, data and any number of other information without one fallible central server or agent.
Benefits from the system extend beyond the economy, and the open information and innovation offered by apps build by the likes of Treum have allowed for growth within and without the rows of hemp plants.
“It’s extremely user friendly. It’s going to enable us to get away from using Excel spreadsheets,” Phelps said. [1]
Reporting from Yahoo! News shows that the appeal of the blockchain is largely its transparency. While some might wonder over the real origins of their food, they can verify it by viewing the open, public ledgers of the blockchain which has documented the yield, watering, pesticide and seed metadata from an entire planting season. [1]
Here, the blockchain is serving a wondrous new purpose beyond its original scope.
This isn’t its first foray into the cannabis market, however. Medical marijuana has also been an industry in past years where blockchain apps and other technologies have been used in an unorthodox market.
According to the blog Bull N Bear Markets, some companies that use technology based on the blockchain to find medical marijuana companies and verify their quality say these apps and websites are the future of marijuana business. [2]
“There’s scepticism [sic] right now from the medical industry and we’re trying to help breach that; it all boils down to information. Information is power, data is power,” the CEO of blockchain company TruTrace told Bull n’ Bear Markets. [2]
Part of the allure of blockchain is that, with the public ledger system, anyone can verify crops and their quality, bringing full transparency to markets.
“If you planted data saying, ‘I’ve planted X type of hemp on X field, and it’s hashed on the blockchain and available for everyone to see,’ somebody could take that information, go to the farm site tagged and say, ‘Well, I don’t see any hemp here,’” Treum Senior Product Manage Anoop Agarwal told Yahoo! News. [1]
Sources
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/cbd-farmer-trials-blockchain-supply-123123105.html
