Paragon and IOTA recently announced a partnership aimed at creating a transparent, verifiable database to help the cannabis industry move towards greater legitimacy. By incorporating IOTA’s unique approach to cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technology, Paragon hopes to deliver a faster technology with lower fees. Paragon will build a fully verifiable database to track prescriptions, and data on batches of cannabis (such as their farm of origin, or THC levels).
“IOTA is an open platform that can ensure data integrity for free at higher volume than any Blockchain can. Therefore it has natural potential in agritech to secure data about the crop,” IOTA’s Co-Founder David Sønstebø said, “We support Paragon’s efforts to create a legitimized and auditable provenance for agricultural crops.”
The first version of Paragon will be built on the Ethereum Blockchain, as previously announced, and then it will transition to a hybrid with IOTA, with technical assistance provided by the non-profit IOTA Foundation.
Whereas Blockchains rely on every node in the network having a full copy of the database and verifying the data, in IOTA’s distributed ledger, peers keep only the data needed, and transactions are verified by a couple of randomly-selected peers. This lightweight design allows IOTA to process transactions faster than Bitcoin and Ethereum. Currently, IOTA is the fifth largest cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of over $2.6 billion.
To learn more about Paragon’s plans to revolutionize all things cannabis with Blockchain, read the white paper here. Paragon will sell 100 million ParagonCoins for $1 each from September 15, 2017 through October 16, 2017. ParagonCoin will begin trading on cryptocurrency exchanges in November 2017. To stay up to date with Paragon’s upcoming announcements, join their community Slack channel here.
