RE:Great NewsPreparing to be the BIG DATA in Cannabis world?! Last June's article: New Tech Could Transform the $60B Marijuana Industry " New Tech Could Transform the $60B Marijuana Industry NEWS PROVIDED BY OilPrice.com Jun 01, 2018, 08:30 ET LONDON, June 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FN Media Group Presents OilPrice.com News Commentary The back pain was killing him - clearly, the time had come to seek treatment. But instead of prescription drugs, Todd Guillion opted for medical marijuana. Why not? The Orange County, California native figured it had to be safer than pharmaceuticals. But shortly after beginning his cannabis regimen, he began suffering terrible numbness in his arms, hands and feet. Mentioned in today's commentary includes: Innovative Industrial Properties (NYSE :IIRP ), AbbVie Inc (NYSE :ABBV ), Zynerba Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ :ZYNE ), Insys Therapeutics (NASDAQ :INSY ), Compass Diversified Holdings (NYSE :CODI ). Had the legal weed poisoned him? He took it to a nationally known lab to find out. Result - his medical cannabis was shown to have been contaminated with high levels of myclobutanil, a toxic fungicide. According to Anthony Torres, a senior researcher at Steep Hill Labs in Berkeley, California, it's especially toxic when inhaled. "Upon combustion, myclobutanil forms cyanide gas," he said, "which can make it into your bloodstream" Unfortunately, the dangerous fungicide isn't the only contaminant that can be found in California's legal pot supply. In a series of Steep Hill tests, 41 of 44 California pot products tested positive for 16 different pesticides. Right now, the only way marijuana users from California - or anywhere else - can ensure their product is pure is through lab testing. Obviously, this isn't a convenient solution for casual users. But help is on the way thanks to blockchain technology. Blockchain is the technology that gave birth to bitcoin, litecoin and ethereum - three of the cryptocurrencies turning the world of financial transactions on its head. But the blockchain is impacting far more than the world of money. In fact, blockchain can track, authenticate or verify any process, including the process of marijuana production and testing. That's where the "BLOCKStrain" comes in. BLOCKStrain (DNAX trading on the TSX Venture) is a proprietary software platform, which utilizes blockchain, that an innovative Canadian software company is unleashing on the marijuana industry. BLOCKStrain is the brainchild of Tommy Stephenson, company CTO, Cameron Chell, the company Chairman and Robert Galarza, CEO. They formed BLOCKStrain after seeing the need for a more efficient marijuana industry verification system. "We are tackling one of the biggest issues in the cannabis industry," Galarza said, "which is verification and visibility of inventory and product for consumers, producers and government. " One of the biggest challenges the wave of cannabis legalization is creating is satisfying consumer demand - far more people want to buy legal marijuana than governments had anticipated. This problem was highlighted in Nevada last summer, when three months' worth of inventory sold out in two weeks after the state legitimized recreational cannabis. All that demand revealed current verification methods for ensuring genetic purity and product safety are administratively cumbersome and unacceptably time-consuming. BLOCKStrain's technology aims to change all that. BLOCKStrain also utilizes genetic testing to create a unique "fingerprint" that's recorded on the blockchain, and then associated to an individual QR code which is then embedded into a comprehensive tracking process. This makes the tracking and testing available on the blockchain viewable in a completely transparent way. "So if you are looking at markets where people are looking for a product," Galarza said, "with our system you can not only find the product, you can be sure that product is exactly what it says it is and that it is pesticide-free." The nuts and bolts of this system were created by Stephenson, the former CTO of California based Ghost Group which created the largest tech player in the cannabis space, Weedmaps. The industry is beginning to see immense potential for BLOCKStrain Technology Corp. (DNAX trading on the TSX Venture), as evidenced by their having poured $10 million into the company in a private placement offering that was closed in March. That's nearly three times more than the $3.5 million the company had originally sought. BLOCKStrain's ability to protect the intellectual property (IP) of growers' varietals and strains, including those under development, but also the complementary suite of software products the company is developing in order to maximize efficiency in this developing industry will have a ripple effect throughout the entire industry. Early adopters of blockchain include WeedMD, Inc., a Canadian licensed producer of medical marijuana that has invested in the company and plans to integrate BLOCKStrain's technology into its platform. Derek Pedro, a design, cultivation and production partner at WeedMD, said the ability of BLOCKStrain to protect its many marijuana varietals was the key reason it signed on with the company. "After conducting an extensive review of the blockchain technologies being proposed for and utilized in the cannabis sector," he said, "we believe that BLOCKStrain is best positioned to protect our intellectual property by further validating and securing our best-in-class genetics." The importance of BLOCKStrain's ability to protect cannabis industry IP cannot be overstated. "The biggest issue in the marketplace is that there is no practical intellectual property protection for cannabis strains," Galarza explained. "There was a case recently where a licensed producer sold a mothering plant for over $1 million dollars" he added, "but the secondary producer said that it died in transit." Yet somehow a product the secondary producer began selling shortly afterward was "eerily" similar to the original licensed product. Galarza believes the secondary producer could have developed a hybrid from genetics the original licensed producer had supplied. "Essentially (that's) bypassing the license," he said, adding that this could have been prevented if BLOCKStrain (DNAX trading on the TSX Venture) had been in use because the genetic "fingerprint" would have been evidence showing that the secondary producer pirated the licensed product. In addition to WeedMD, several other licensed producers are expressing interest in signing on with BLOCKStrain. While these clients will obviously generate revenue, the company won't be relying exclusively on large enterprise clients for it. That's because its revenue model is built largely on volume and incremental usage. The way it works is every user of the system will pay reasonable fees based on what parts of the blockchain they want to access, or which of its features they want to implement. These include craft growers who want IP protection, individuals who want to make sure the product they're buying is pesticide free, dispensaries that want to track where a product is in the testing cycle, and government agencies that want to verify the completion of tests." https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-tech-could-transform-the-60b-marijuana-industry-684271451.html
mrcashflow wrote: Awesome news, Company is putting all the peices in place to become a global leader in cannabis database technology. I can see cannibas companies becoming quite interested in this technology as the sector evolves. This company is placing itself in the forefront of cannabis cultivation. Nice to see,, now lets see them get some more relevant companies onboard buying into their technology.
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