Necessity is the mother of invention, and prohibition necessitated a veil of obscurity. As that veil is lifted and hemp becomes legal across the United States, it is radical transparency we demand, not opacity and the resulting confusion. Things that were once done in darkness, in the secret fields and hidden backrooms of the not especially risk-averse, are done now in the open. Bringing that which was once clandestine safely into the light is no small task; for trust to thrive where suspicion was once king we require new systems of clarity and understanding.

Trace shines a light, revealing the truth of a market never before understood or even seen in totality; that opacity was by design, but so too is our transparency. Trace is a data collective, a distributed ledger written in digital pen and designed to generate as perfect a picture of the hemp industry and all of its constituent parts as it is possible to create. An accurate understanding of a thing requires perspective, multiple views to compare and contrast; one side or one color is not enough by half. Trace is fundamentally, at its core, a collaboration. By uniting and collating the knowledge of every collaborator across every branch of the hemp industry, a living portrait, accurate down to the plant, can be painted in real time.

That collective knowledge, self-reported via our free software, can be shared privately and immutably with government regulators and consumers to provide both legal compliance and a more equitable, transparent exchange of product. The blockchain and its distributed ledger presents a generational opportunity to speak truth to flower and illicit real change in the most important emerging market of our lifetimes.