The cannabis industry in North America has been struggling with the issue of being forced to work almost exclusively in cash. The reason being that cannabis is still illegal on the federal level in both the U.S. and Canada.
This poses quite a problem for cannabis businesses, because they are forced to keep very large amounts of cash on their premises which makes them all targets for robbery. Paying taxes to the government is also much more difficult when you can’t use a business account, checks, or anything else besides paper money. We noted before about a Denver-based private security firm that was accepting bitcoin as a payment from the cannabis businesses they helped to secure.
Startups from the technology sector are attempting to provide solutions to cannabis entrepreneurs experiencing the difficulty of not having access to financial services businesses. One of the first ones to show up in the industry was Tokken, which is an e-payment system using a blockchain feature, that allows customers to make their purchases through their phones rather than with cash.
Two other startups are Kind Financial and Hypur, both of which provide a service that tracks and monitors all transactions for cannabis companies trying to move away from cash-only transactions. Hypur also provides a GPS service which helps to track official purchases made at a legal dispensary.
More startups like these will likely become more commonplace and fill the void that is left by the federal drug laws which keep the cannabis industry a step behind in engaging in legitimate business activity.