This startup is combining nature and emerging tech to help mitigate climate change.
What do blockchains, track-and-trace technology, and carbon credits have to do each other — not to mention with hemp?
A Utah-based start up is combining these emerging technologies with an ancient plant, cannabis, in the hopes of staving off the climate crisis, reports Hemp Magazine.
Here’s how.
First, What’s a Blockchain?
A blockchain is a decentralized, electronic record of transactions. As defined by the financial media site Investopedia, it’s a digital public ledger that exists across a network. (Cryptocurrency is a medium of exchange stored and tracked digitally in the blockchain.)
OK, What’s “Track and Trace?”
This is the effort to track cannabis plants through the supply chain: from growth and harvest through processing and testing to transport and sale. Why is it needed? State regulators see it as a necessary step in ensuring compliance and tracking legally-produced inventory.
And What Are Carbon Credits Again?
Carbon credits, also called carbon offsets, are akin to tickets or tokens. Each ticket allows a business to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. The more tickets a business has, the more they can emit. Conversely, the less they emit, the fewer tickets they need. Those who don’t use all of theirs can sell them to someone who needs more, giving carbon credits the value of real currency. This system can also be used with other greenhouse gasses.
Bringing It All Together
The Hemp Blockchain will offer a track-and-trace platform that’s also blockchain-enabled for trading carbon credits. This will:
- Allow verification of credentials, licenses, and certifications
- Record source and origin of plants
- Track the movement of raw and processed materials through the supply chain
- Record product quality information
- Track sequestration and emissions in the blockchain
- Validate carbon credits based on farming practices and data collection
- Allow carbon offset credits to be traded
As the company says on its website, “The revenue from those sales provides an additional revenue stream to the hemp industry through their growing of carbon credits from the earth, for the earth.”
The Hemp Blockchain getting ready to launch its blockchain technology, creating a marketplace that uses smart contracts, fiat, cryptocurrency, and carbon credits.
“We think what we’re offering will become the standard,” Steve Prosniewski, COO of The Hemp Blockchain, told Hemp Magazine. “Once the seed goes into the ground, we’ll have the capacity to collect data in real-time on different variables—like the weather—and also keep track of how much carbon is being sequestered. We’re following the product all the way.”
“Once the seed goes into the ground, we’ll have the capacity to collect data in real-time on different variables—like the weather—and also keep track of how much carbon is being sequestered. We’re following the product all the way.”
— Steve Prosniewski, COO, The Hemp Blockchain
The company has already started to form partnerships with hemp farmers around the world, including Africa, Canada, China, France, South America and the U.S.
“The Hemp Blockchain realized that hemp had a lot of potentials and has the ability to do a lot of different things, like serve as a material to make plant-based products and remove carbon from the air,” Prosniewski told Hemp Magazine. “It’s a lot like [the movie] ‘Back to the Future,’ where we’re grabbing a plant that was outlawed for suspect reasons, and we’re using it as a tool we can use now and into the future.”
