Blockchain To The Endgame
When most people hear the term “blockchain technology” they typically think of cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. While a decentralized currency may be useful, ledger technology has an endless amount of applications across almost every industry. Through blockchain, digital assets are distributed and decentralized, meaning no single person or computer controls access, rather, the asset has a transparent ledger of changes. Sharing medical records for patients between healthcare specialists, tracking fraud in financial transactions, and securely tracking intellectual property such as patents are among the most used aspects of blockchain technology. The possibilities of blockchain use in a rocketing cannabis industry is generating a great deal of attention and excitement.
MIT Technology Review says, “The whole point of using a blockchain is to let people — in particular, people who don’t trust one another — share valuable data in a secure, tamperproof way.” This technology is especially useful in the cannabis industry, which is relatively new and has cloudy, ever changing regulations. Trust and transparency are cornerstones of legal cannabis transactions. With regulations differing across borders blockchain would be able to provide a sort of accessible diary of every aspect of a plant’s creation. There would no longer be any uncertainty for regulatory agencies trying to ensure that cannabis companies are above board. It would also make it easy for federal, state, and local governments to keep track of a company’s revenue so that they are properly taxed. These are expensive problems that the cannabis industry has been plagued with from the beginning.
For farmers, blockchain can revolutionize growing methods, quality, and yield. With weather sensory stations in the field farmers can monitor temperature, humidity, solar radiance, wind speed and direction, rainfall, soil temperature and moisture, and EC. This information can be submitted automatically to the blockchain, allowing farmers to use this information to improve and scale growth. This would enhance irrigation practices, streamline the use of fertilizers and pesticides, make machinery use more efficient, and help manage labor. The result would lower costs on many fronts and allow farmers to focus more on the quality of their yield.
The transparency blockchain allows isn’t limited to farmers, governments, manufacturers of goods or retailers. The consumer is also a winner. Trusting that the supply chain had provable oversight of every aspect from seed to final product is something that consumers have never experienced. The cannabis industry, unfortunately, has been stained with companies that practice malicious greed, without regard to the health or safety of end users. This sort of greed could be a thing of the past with the use of blockchain technology, giving consumers the ability to see their purchase on every stop of its ride from start to finish.
If regional leading to full-scale federal legalization of cannabis is an end goal, transformation of the supply chain is something that must happen. The industry needs solutions for legal, logistical, and consumer confidence problems it has struggled with. Implementation of blockchain technology appears to be the clear solution to these issues, and will certainly provide lanes to solve other problems that haven’t been encountered as we march through uncharted territory in a booming new industry.