Industry: Government, Medicinal Cannabis
Overview: Utilize a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) or Blockchain Solution to create a trusted, immutable record for confirming registration, licensing, certification, credentialing, and payment processing. Also includes a tracking system component for chain of custody, supply chain management, and inventory management.
Challenge: Within the highly regulated medical cannabis industry there was a need for a secure solution that offered immutability, redundancy, transaction management, and provenance in an easy to use format that insured trust.
Solutions: Utilize DLT network through a web application interface.
Technologies: Hedera Hashgraph, Cross-platform mobile applications
Summary:
The Medicinal and Recreational Cannabis industries are currently in early stages of growth. There are still several states that don’t offer medical cannabis, and even fewer offer access to recreational cannabis. As the highly regulated industry grows there is an increasing demand for trusted technology solutions that can answer the need for end to end tracking throughout the supply chain and purchasing process with proven trust and improved auditability.
Throughout its cycle of cultivation, extraction, testing, distribution and retail, cannabis must be tracked and documented at each step, and able to be easily audited by regulatory agencies. While many existing legacy technologies may have this capability, distributed ledgers have those features inherently, so DLT was chosen as the ideal technology behind the platform.
Some DLT platforms, most notably Blockchain, still have some technical shortcomings such as scalability and transaction speed. For this reason we turned to Hedera Hashgraph’s recently launched public network. Hedera’s platform offers many similar features including the same trust and immutability that other Blockchain Platforms can offer, but with vastly superior speed, efficiency, and scalability.
The solution includes an immutable data store (the Ledger) that cryptographically secures, holds and manages Credentials of Patients, Pharmacy/Retail Centers, and Cultivators – in alignment with the verification of Regulators. Smart Contracts are able to govern and validate transactions between all actors in the system, at every junction between the parties. In addition, the solution used the same technical capabilities to track and audit Product Inventory, Transformation, and Destruction activities. There was also an option to use a cryptocurrency as a payment mechanism, which is an important aspect of the system. It enables regulators to transparently collect applicable taxes at the time the transaction is executed, and has the potential to ease the difficulties that legal marijuana businesses encounter due to existing banking regulations.
Cannabis Tracking – Customer Purchase Example Walkthrough
Download the Cannabis Tracking Design Walkthrough PDF
