What’s next for the blockchain startup Budbo
Co-founder and president Luke Patterson explains Budbo's roadmap for 2018 to Crypto Finder.
Interview from Blockchain Week London on 23 January 2018.
Read the transcript:
The 30-second pitch would essentially be that we're supply chain management for the cannabis industry. We're going for full security, full transparency through blockchain.
The cannabis industry is unique in the sense that it's new – it's budding if you will – and we have the opportunity to create a full infrastructure. A backbone for the industry on blockchain which could then serve, you know, as a blueprint for the agriculture industry, the pharmaceutical industry, even the insurance industry.
All those are entrenched processes already, but the cannabis industry is so new that nothing's in place. It's extremely fragmented. Every state has its own set of laws, so we can standardise that with blockchain.
And what's the roadmap? And where do you want to go with this?
So we'll release version 2 of the app in May. We're in development right now. We actually also just successfully tested and ran our first track shipment on, completely ran on, the blockchain platform. Right now, we track a pound of marijuana about every 47 seconds.
So we're just shifting all of that over for the compliance reporting onto blockchain, so we'll hopefully have that done by Q2, at the very latest Q3, and will be completely ran on blockchain, you know, about probably June or July.
And you said you're very focused on the user experience. Are there any kind of special features you can tell me about that you really think add to that?
Yeah, well, the strain match feature that I mentioned I think is one of our best features that we have. It's a series of about twelve sliders that allows the patient or recreational user to put in the symptoms they might be experiencing or the experience that they want to have from the particular product.
We run it through an algorithm and we give them the ten to twelve strains of best fit. If they're locally available, they can go get them. If they're not available yet, whenever that strain becomes available, our local dispensary collective will send that user a push notification, so they can then go get the product that they were looking for.
And have you met with any moral resistance, you know, from business people?
No, not here. I think the stigma of cannabis is off, right? Too much research has been done in the medical field with Parkinson's, PTSD, epilepsy, some life-threatening diseases that we've seen almost completely some of the symptoms alleviated through the use of cannabis.
So we're very careful where we go and what grounds we step on. Professionalism is obviously extremely important to us, especially in this industry. So we haven't really seen that. And if it's an issue, we'll always talk to people and present our side of the story, and we're open-minded to people's resistance too, you know, obviously. So we haven't seen any of it, but we're cognisant of the space that we operate in for sure.
And do you think that using this platform gives you an opportunity to reach out to people who might not be able to access information about cannabis?
Absolutely, absolutely. As large as the industry is, some of the information that gets out there is extremely underreported. So we almost look at it as, you know, the hundred thousand plus users that we have, almost running clinical trials on some of the strains. Which is why we put that data that's coming back from the growers so on and so forth publicly accessible through the blockchain so that research and that data can get out there into the right hands.
Why is it so important that your token not be used to directly trade and pay for the cannabis?
Well, then we get into the AML – the anti-money laundering stuff. Because it is federally illegal, you can't buy a product that's illegal with a cryptocurrency and move it through state lines so on. There's different issues there, so we've been very careful not to allow the token to be used like that, which obviously protects the contributors and it protects the industry as a whole.
