BitCanna enters the Cosmos
What is the BitCanna Cosmos invitational testnet, and why it’s so important for the future of a billions-worthy market
Italian illegal cannabis market is huge. From recent studies, we know that almost 1 Italian out of 10 consumes cannabis regularly. Since this market is completely illegal, it means that every year crime organizations like the mafia earn billions of euros. This is causing our economy to loose around 8 billion of euros per year of missed tax revenues from the legal selling of weed alone.
On a global level, the whole market is valued at 340 billion dollars per year. This allows us to easily understand why states like Colorado, Washington and many others have already decided to legalize it, and why we can expect many more to do so in the following years.
Due to the social stigma that this plant carries, however, one thing that is really important to do is to create a payment platform that allows to preserve the buyers’ anonymity while still granting them what they are buying is safe for use 🤝.
This is exactly what BitCanna is trying to archive.
Introducing BitCanna 🌱
Born a couple of years ago as a fork of Dash, a Proof-of-Work blockchain, this project markets itself as “The Cannabis Blockchain” and aims at creating a multi level system that allows cannabis consumer to track the product they are buying as well as to pay using a new cryptocurrency named BitCanna.
Their mainnet has been live for years now, and they already managed to get some of the biggest names in the industry as partners. We are talking of Barney’s, SensiSeeds, Royal Queen Seeds and many other seeds producer and farmers 🚜.
Moving to Cosmos 🌌
Recently, the team decided to start exploring with the Cosmos technology. This was done in order to switch from a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm to a Proof-of-Stake one, as well as to be able to connect to other zones using IBC.
Their journey started with the first Invitational testnet, to which I was invited as a professional validator. Since I’ve been looking as this project since it decided to move to Cosmos, it was a honor for me to join their community of validators and help other people out when needed.
Until now, things have gone super smooth. The team is very well organized, offers assistance to anyone that might ask for it and in multiple languages as well. Also, guides are very well written and the whole community itself is great 👥.
To be honest, I can’t wait until they start implementing custom logic into their chain in order to explore more on how this amazing project is going to evolve. While the current chain code is pretty standard, I expect we will see really interesting stuff being developed there. Who knows, we might even see it integrating with other chains using IBC for things that are different than simple token transfers 😉.
That being said, I will try to do my best to support the team and make the project thrive. I really expect we will see a radical shift around the cannabis legal situation in Europe and the rest of the world in the next years. If that’s the case, having a trustworthy tracking and payment processing platform will surely be more and more important over time.
In the meanwhile, let’s all take our time enjoying this journey while smoking one 🚬.
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
— Carl Segan
