Trace is happy to announce that we just became the latest member of the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC). It’s great to see our logo listed alongside other projects who are all using blockchain to make the world a better place.
On a practical level, our vision has always been to create a complete ecosystem that uses Trace as the source of truth for hemp and cannabis supply chain data and to provide businesses with a one-stop shop for compliance and commerce. But our mission has always been bigger than just our product. Hemp and cannabis present the ultimate supply chain accountability challenge: if we can solve the problems in these emerging industries, we can solve it for any industry, and make huge positive impacts on our communities along the way.
The prohibition of cannabis has kept millions of nonviolent people locked up for decades, disproportionately ruining lives and families of people of color, and doing almost nothing to curtail the endless and costly war on drugs. There is only one way to fix this problem: tax and regulate. While serious steps have been made towards this goal in the past two decades, the regulatory systems built for early cannabis markets simply do not scale, and were designed out of fear, providing a false sense of security at best and squeezing small farms out of existence at worst.
The only way to bring legal cannabis to every state in America is to prove that this plant can be properly regulated and support diverse businesses of all sizes. Regulatory systems need to prioritize the protection of consumers over the fear of the illegal market. We strongly believe that if we can improve the lives of consumers while lowering the costs of doing business — first for hemp and then for cannabis — we can build the world’s most inclusive, efficient and decentralized supply chain here in our backyards. The farm bill of 2018 legalized hemp nationally, and provided a generational opportunity to prove that there is a better way forward. We at Trace intend to do just that!
Stay tuned for more news on our collaboration with the good folks over at BSIC!
