What is Budbo? Blockchain and the cannabis industry
Luke Patterson, co-founder and president of Budbo, talks blockchain and the cannabis industry
Crypto Finder sat down with Budbo co-founder and president Luke Patterson to get the low down on how Budbo is using the blockchain to help manage the global cannabis industry.
Interview from Blockchain Week London on 23 January 2018.
Read the transcript:
So my name is Luke Patterson from Austin, Texas. We're with Budbo Token International. We've been in the cannabis industry for about three years now, running a consumer-facing mobile app and also a supply-chain management which tracks commercial marijuana movements.
So what exactly is it that you do?
So on the consumer-facing side, we do user analytics based on location. So we give a kind of business data back to dispensaries, growers, manufacturers, so they know what products and strains are going to be popular in their area.
On the supply-chain side, we do electronic documentation, verified proof of pickup and proof of delivery through EOBRs, electronic onboard recorders. And we've been porting all of that stuff over to blockchain to use the immutable ledger for compliance reporting.
And how long have you been in the crypto world? When did that move happen?
So we've been in the cannabis industry for three years. We've been in the crypto space from a token side and blockchain for about the last six months.
And why did you make the decision to make that change?
So when we started getting into government regulations, we needed to use the immutable ledger for compliance reporting so on and so forth, so it just made sense. The security on blockchain when we talk about things like patient ID verifications, patient records, the proof of pickup, proof of delivery for commercial shipments, it just made sense to push all that stuff on the blockchain for, you know, security reasons and also transparency inside the cannabis industry.
And what's unique about Budbo? What problems are you solving?
Great question. The real thing that separates us apart is the fact that our consumer app really drives all of the data analytics on patients and consumers.
So we actually track it all the way from the farm to the marketplace. And through consumer reviews and things like that, we take it a step further and we really find out how the product affects the patient, and we track that and we look at data analytics, predictive AI, so we can really get better data back on the growers.
So we see exactly what type of grow happens to produce an effect or alleviate a symptom whether that be PTSD, whether it be good for Parkinson's so on and so forth. So we're trying to make that data available, you know, to everybody.
Who is your customer?
So it's really 10 different people essentially, would be our customer. So the consumers obviously would be recreational cannabis users who use the app, medical marijuana patients who use the app, and then on the business side of it, it'd be dispensaries, growers, product manufacturers, people who make edibles, concentrates, lab testing, THC CBD testing facilities.
We have three contracts with major hospitals in the US to collect the data for cancer research, so it really runs the gamut of people who want this data aggregation that we've assembled for them.
