With broader legalization across the world, the size of the cannabis industry has been going nowhere but up for the past decade, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars globally for both medical and recreational use. However, many of the inner workings of the marijuana industry are shady.
Paragon uses the blockchain in order to modernize and shed light on the sector, utilizing a combination of smart contracts and blockchain infrastructure.
ICO
The ICO was heavily marketed, with famous rapper The Game promoting the project along with model Jessica Versteeg as CEO. The crowdsale ended up raising $70,000,000.
Smart Contracts
Paragon takes advantage of the blockchain ecosystem to solve fundamental issues in the cannabis industry. It does so by putting cannabis data on the blockchain, tracking things like supply chain data, medical marijuana prescription IDs and sharing relevant cannabis documentation.
The smart contracts will also display the properties of each physical product, for example, information about the strain or the amounts of active ingredients.
Paragon Space
Paragon plans to establish centers in countries/cities where marijuana is legal in an attempt to provide easy access to the platform to startups, helping them to manage and grow their business.
Individuals can use those centers to get legal and business advice and to access valuable information about the industry and its practices.
ParagonCoin
ParagonCoin is an ERC20 token built on the Ethereum network. It enables participants in the network to easily exchange value peer-to-peer.
The transaction costs are static and transactions settle within a minute, providing an easy payment method in an industry that has been known to have issues with banking and payments.
Challenges
Paragon has some very serious issues. To start off, the CEO, Jessica Versteeg has no previous background in blockchain whatsoever.
The project is mainly ran by her husband, Egor Lavrov, a Russian businessman with an unclear, questionable past. Their twitter is full of fake followers providing fake engagements and replies.
The amount they raised was absurdly excessive for a project that doesn’t even need a blockchain and after the complaints of some investors the SEC had to get involved, filing a Federal class-action lawsuit against ParagonCoin. The whole ICO was very aggressively marketed and the marketing campaign focused more on the support of rappers rather than the technology the project offers.
Paragon is a very controversial project. The very fact that the US Securities and Exchange commission had to get involved and file a lawsuit against the company speaks enough. Caution is advised when investing.
