A new press release is circulating all over the latest cryptocurrency news, showing that the state of Arizona will test a blockchain-based cannabis industry related payments solution within its fintech sandbox.
As the recent press release from the Office of the Attorney General shows, the company named Alta is actually a cash management solution for licensed medical marijuana providers and vendors. The Arizona-based financial services startup wants to offer a stablecoin that is pegged 1:1 with the United States dollar.
During the sandbox testing phase, Alta will be trialing its member onboarding and remittances platform. The state of Arizona will test the solution and its end goal is to let users pay for goods and services while using the stablecoin instead of fiat money.
Cannabis, even though it is legal in some states in the U.S., is still considered a big taboo – and a controlled illegal substance by the federal government. As many best cryptocurrency news sites showed, banks are hesitant to deal with cannabis-related businesses as it would be grounds for the government to revoke their federal deposit insurance. This is a crucial financial safety net for banks.
According to the co-founder and COO of Alta, the state of Arizona will test this new blockchain service and it will likely provide a crucial financial service and make the local communities a lot safer:
“The cash economy for legal cannabis in Arizona exceeds $350 million annually […] These are legitimate companies, innovators and entrepreneurs that are forced to operate in cash. We offer them peace of mind. Our digital payment technology lifts the burdens of having to operate solely through cash and makes our communities safer.”
Meanwhile, there are many other crypto businesses and state governments which have tried to bridge the gap between the financial and cannabis industries. In 2017, we saw that the Dash network started paying the firm Alt Thirty Six to integrate Dash as a payment option in the cannabis industry and its point-of-sale systems.
From a regulatory side, lawmakers in the state of California proposed a bill this February in order to accept crypto for tax payments from cannabis-related businesses. The bill has not moved out of the committee since March.
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