The aim of our project is to help people across the world get fair and equal pay for the goods they produce through real world asset pooling and distribution points or markets hosted by the community and community treasuries. There is currently a large discrepancy between the prices many farmers and small manufacturers of goods are paid compared to the price products retail for. There are many good reasons for this; costs to distributors, transportation, sales staff, and traditional large corporate supply chains.
Large corporations, empowered by governments, have forced the margins that real producers earn down so far that our world is no longer sustainable. Small farmers and manufacturers have their production absorbed by corporate conglomerates, and people no longer have governance over their time, value, distribution channels, or local communities.
Our team sees a future where many more manufactured goods and whole food items are produced in smaller batches and distributed more locally. We believe that with advances in manufacturing technology and the migration of people away from larger cities, the transition to more locally produced manufactured goods and food items will be a natural occurrence. The Blockchain and crypto-sphere have demonstrated how individuals with similar interests can pool resources, circumvent large corporate middlemen, and bring value back to individuals for their work and productive force.
We aim to aid in this process, in the real world, by implementing tokens pegged to physically deliverable goods and implementing a governance system in tandem with community run physical delivery points/markets to assure that the value of the tokens are physically redeemable. The system proposed will function similarly to oil futures contracts on the surface, with the explicit differences that the markets/delivery points will be maintained by a decentralized entity and tokens are a stable currency and will be redeemable at any time, or hodled for any amount of time. A currency pegged to the good, and a supply of that good that can be delivered at any time.
We believe that having these systems implemented for different goods could help global price discovery and help alleviate the friction between producers and buyers of goods, while turning the function of the middlemen over to the community. We are working to get set up on UNISWAP and we are looking at making sure we are bridged to XDAI and HONEYSWAP. These are on track for release in the next few months.
$GOW Token Introduction
$GOW Token is the token we will be releasing for the good we produce. From here forward we will refer to $GOW, but the token itself could be interchanged for a token representing a promise of delivery of any good. For example you could have a $POC Token that represents the promise of delivery of a Pound Of Coffee. Alternately you could have $BOO that could represent the promise of delivery of a Barrel Of Oil. The stability and trust in this token is established and managed by the community and existence of physical delivery points.
Our aim with our token is to implement and experiment with our niche in decentralizing the world of tomorrow. We’re looking forward to building with the community and seeing how much of an impact we can have balancing physical global markets. The main goal of this project is to advance supply chain structure into a more sustainable system, and to more equally distribute value among individuals who contribute goods to the global community.
$GOW Community Structure
One of the most important aspects of implementing our project is the division of power among different parts of the community and the active engagement of the community in furthering the project. There will be four major contributing bodies to the community. Every individual good will have to have it’s own community, subdivided in a similar manner, the way all goods have their own individual supply chains now.
$GOW Council, $GOW Treasury, $GOW Co-op of Businesses, and Individuals Hodling $GOW.
Two of these bodies will be elected and managed via community voting. A $GOW Council that will manage the administrative end of the project including the $GOW Treasury, and the $GOW Treasury that will function as a repository for $GOW Tokens when they are not in the hands of the community members/ for now the tokens are in the hands of the $GOW Council, but we are setting up a crowdsale to keep the $GOW flowing after the original round of distribution. The $GOW Co-op of Businesses and the $GOW Hodlers will equally share voting power, and each groups voting power will be equally distributed among its members. Businesses involved in producing or distributing $GOW or the underlying good will be members of the $GOW Co-op of Businesses. Any individual $GOW Hodlers/anyone in possession of $GOW/ will also automatically have their portion of the voting power for their participation in the community.
We are calling the current $GOW team the Genesis Council. Once the infrastructure and community involvement is built up to a functional level we will look to the community to vote on replacing us and guiding the project forward.
Community Interface
- $GOW Council
The job of the $GOW Council is to handle administrative tasks, manage some (but not all) physical delivery points, guide development, and insure a successful adoption process. What $GOW specifically represents is the promise of the physical deliver of one Gram Of Weed. Weed referring to high quality organic Cannabis. We are initially going to be operating in California and working within California’s legal framework. This system is structured in compliance with California state law. We anticipate that as the community grows we may need sub-councils to manage legal compliance and supply chain structure in specific regions with different legal structures ie. states outside of California. These sub-councils will also be community elected. The $GOW Council does not have any voting power in elections, they are there to serve the community and the project.
2. $GOW Co-op of Businesses
For compliance; cannabis plants must have their location and weights tracked and traced from the moment they are planted until they are sold. Distributed ledger technology is specifically good at handling this kind of task. We will release a $GOW Co-op of Businesses dapp in which producers and distributors of cannabis can enter in the track and trace information, vote in community elections, and use a combination of $GOW Tokens and other Stablecoins to transfer cannabis and value between different parts of the supply chain. There is a large need for a concise data solution for tracking and tracing cannabis and a Blockchain powered solution to this data problem will be revolutionary for the cannabis industry, as well as for production data management worldwide. You can see use cases like this becoming a reality with projects like Vechain and Cardano piloting supply chain tracking and authentication. We want to build on this trend for our specific highly controlled market and further the use of this technology.
However, our solution is only one piece of our puzzle and we are not trying to be mutually exclusive. We have not yet partnered with any Blockchain companies but we will explore different solutions for delivering the best experience. We will start out with our in-house $GOW specific dapp for managing the business end of our community interface and meeting legal compliance standards, but as producers of different goods adopt our supply chain structure and develop decentralized physical goods pools and distribution networks we are open to partnering with larger projects to supply solutions. Ultimately, each community will have to vote on whether or not to cross those bridges.
3. $GOW Hodlers
A second dapp for $GOW Hodlers/End Users will be available. $GOW will be a token on a public Blockchain and compatible with normal cryptowallets. We will discuss the choice of host Blockchain later in this paper. For legal compliance we will have to have a form of Know Your Customer (KYC) to be able to have physical delivery. To use the dapp or to hold $GOW in any of your wallets will be possible anonymously the same way as any other Token. We will not require KYC to use our dapps. The only purpose of the KYC is for age verification. Remember, our community’s physical delivery points will be in California and must meet the requirements and licensing standards of California. However, $GOW Tokens, once released, will be free to move around the world unobstructed. So, anyone can trade, Hodl, or vote. If you are able to legally buy cannabis in California you will be able to use the dapp to KYC and interface with the delivery points or markets. We will touch on KYC solutions a little more later when we address our choice of Blockchain. The delivery points or markets will accept one $GOW Token and dispense one actual organic, high quality, gram of cannabis flower. This ensures the stability of our currency $GOW.
4. $GOW Treasury
The $GOW Treasury is a repository where $GOW will live between farmers/producers and consumers. They will be released and re-released to the community through $GOW Treasury sales of $GOW Tokens, which will then make their way back to the $GOW Treasury through our supply chain ecosystem. The $GOW Treasury is a essentially a bucket for the $GOW Tokens not in circulation and has no voting power or identity. The $GOW Treasury will be managed by the $GOW Council. The percentage of circulating $GOW Tokens and the allocation of the $GOW Tokens from the $GOW Treasury will be adjusted depending on demand, and by the $GOW Council and $GOW Community voting.
$GOW Tokens will flow in and out of the $GOW Treasury. This system will be like a fountain. Where $GOW Tokens are distributed for a wholesale price but redeemable for a retail good. The retail price of the good being higher than the $GOW Treasury Sale price will be the imbalance that will provide entropy to our system, and bring it to life.
Components of the Legal Cannabis Supply Chain in California and $GOW
The supply chain of cannabis is broken into three separate groups. Each of which requires it’s own permits.
- Physical Delivery locations/ retail shops, who hold another permit to distribute cannabis to consumers.
- Distributors, who have permits for purchase wholesale from farmers and sale to retail shops .
- Farmers who hold permits for their production spaces
For our ecosystem we will start by obtaining a retail permitted location and release our dapps. This is the minimum establishment we will need to breathe life into our supply chain. Our second major objective will to obtain our own wholesaler/distributor license so we can interact with farms directly. We are in contact with enough producers to service a number of physical delivery locations. Retail locations can be bought out with their permits in place. A distributors permit is the cheapest and easiest of the permits to obtain, and this is the route we are planning on going to bring our ecosystem to life. Our third major goal will be building out a farm dedicated to supplying liquidity on the production end. As each of these milestones is reached over the next two years we hope to have a community that is capable of moving forward and phasing out the Genesis Council to evolve the ecosystem.
Our aspiration is to be able to install vending machines that can dispense cannabis, using our GOW Hodler dapp to KYC and transfer value. Making the process of exchanging of $GOW currency for the good it is pegged to contact-less and as economically efficient as possible. This depends entirely on local governments getting on board with vending machines, which is already becoming a reality, just with a back-end based on traditional financial technology. In the age of coronavirus we are optimistic for vending machines, however we are prepared to manage staffed locations. The further we can reduce the staff the $GOW Council has to maintain for physical delivery the more value the community can extract from the project and $GOW.
Marketplace pools of goods for permitted distributors are another powerful tool at the hands of this ecosystem. In the instance of Farmers pooling together for distributors to purchase from, for distributors pooling for Retailers to purchase from, and in the instance of $GOW farmers market or Co-op stores where individual retailers can pool together and provide liquidity in the form of deliverable cannabis to consumers. We are initially going to launch our permitted distribution/buying operation and as many $GOW Council physical delivery points as funding will allow to get the system going. As $GOW and currencies representing goods gain traction other retailers will have to adopt the tokens for use. Participation in supply ecosystems like the one we are detailing here will prove to be more economic than our current supply chain systems.
The marketplaces and adoption outside of $GOW Council managed delivery points will be a focus of development for the $GOW Council and $GOW Community as the ecosystem takes its first few steps in the wider world. This means getting on official DEX lists and increasing the number of companies that interact with our ecosystem.
In summary; we will start a dispensary to service $GOW demand as quickly as possible. This is to quickly make sure that $GOW Token can be converted to the good the currency’s value is pegged to. Secondly we will obtain a distributor/wholesaler license to use $GOW to be able to supply and pool Cannabis for our dispensary and other participating dispensaries. All members of the Genesis Council have or still do work for legal cannabis companies, and the number of tokens we release is based on our actual ability to provide liquidity at the delivery points initially. Once liquidity is flowing from the $GOW Treasury to $GOW Hodlers and back through our ecosystem we will look to establish a $GOW Farm to ensure the continuity of our project, and ask the community for direction in growing the project.
Here is a Flow Chart of how Value will move through our Ecosystem
GOW Start-Up Process
To bring our supply chain ecosystem to life we are going to host the Genesis $GOW Treasury Sale. We will put the Tokens out into the world at a calculated wholesale price equal to the relative $USD wholesale price for a gram of cannabis(~7) . $GOW is a Stablecoin worth one gram of cannabis and will always hold it’s value. Fluctuation in the dollar and peer-to-peer or currency market trading could cause $USD/$GOW fluctuation, however $GOW Tokens will hold their value in a much more stable way than fiat currencies like $USD.
Our pre-sale price will be relative to 7 $DAI per 1 $GOW. There will be 2.5 million $GOW created initially and half of that amount will be available at the Genesis $GOW Treasury Sale. 1.25 million grams of cannabis is equivalent to ~2,753.5 pounds of cannabis. This sounds like a lot but in reality daily cannabis volumes at retail points in large cities can range from 20–500 pounds in a day. Our selection of releasing 1.25 million $GOW is a number we believe to provide enough funding to bring this ecosystem to a sustainable level of volume and liquidity. The amount of $GOW in circulation and the overall amount of $GOW can be voted on being changed by the community, to more accurately reflect and service the volumes in the market. We will be deploying this only on Ethereum to keep things simple at the start. Then we will bridge to XDAI and start looking at getting on DEXs and possibly deploying something like xmoon.exchange for our ecosystem in the meantime.
We like the idea of building on Cardano, and we would like to integrate their Atala project for identy verification for our KYC, and use their chain to host our token. However, Cardano does not yet have that level of functionality. So we will be starting with Ethereum because the tools are there for us to build with and use already. This being said, we may bridge and may migrate in the near future to Cardano or XDAI.
Independent farms, distributors, retail locations, and consumers are all welcome and will be encouraged to adopt and participate in this system. Throughout this period of initial growth we will turn more and more to the community for voting on decisions, and the Genesis Council will be replaced in part or in whole by enthusiastic members of the community. Ultimately, we hope to just be one business within the ecosystem we are deploying.
We are farmers, manufacturing professionals, and artists who have interests in economics, sustainability, and finance. This project is born out of a real need to help everyone who produces goods receive more fair pay and for distribution ecosystems become more decentralized than current supply chain structures.
Our Time-Frame for Release
Our aim is to have wholesale purchasing/distribution channel and a physical delivery site operating and accepting tokens by the end of 2021, and at least one farm established and operational by mid 2022. The framework for the businesses is in place and accessible.
The largest challenge for us initially is funding. This has been entirely a passion project for the members working on it so far. We feel close enough to being able to deploy this experiment that we will start circulating tokens. You can receive tokens for a donation now. These real $GOW Tokens will be physically deliverable upon once we have the permits in place for a retail site. With that we can at least physically deliver and set a base value for this currency.
We will generate the 2.5 million initial $GOW Tokens and begin our Genesis $GOW Treasury Sale, with no time limit. The Genesis $GOW Treasury Sale will be concluded once 1.25 million $GOW Tokens have been distributed. The Genesis $GOW Council estimates that once we have distributed the first 125,000 $GOW Tokens we will audit and distribute our dapps(we need to take some time and polish them up the end user app will have basic functionality as a wallet and voting soon to come, and the business end app will have a lot more functionality for track and trace standards and worksite management). We will also be able to establish our first physical delivery site and hopefully be able to service our own distribution and supply pooling needs(wholesale purchasing). At 250,000 $GOW Tokens distributed we will focus on starting our own $GOW production facility. The rest of the funds will be held by the $GOW Treasury, and democratically held or allocated.
Once $GOW begins to flow back to physical delivery points, to distributors, to farmers, and back into the $GOW Treasury a certain amount of $GOW Tokens will be allocated to a daily/continuous $GOW Treasury sale at a rate determined by the $GOW Council and $GOW community in an amount that supports demand.
The speed at which this evolves is now in the hands of the community. The Genesis $GOW Council is excited to establish this system and turn it over to producers and consumers worldwide. Our goal is to level the global economic playing field by utilizing tokenization and dapps to help value from consumers reach producers more directly, and to democratize supply chain ecosystems.
You can contact us about contributing to the project and get your $GOW Tokens at:
gowtoken@pm.me
The Genesis Council will release the tokens after receiving email communication and an donation relative to the number of $GOW Tokens you wish to receive.
Our Token Contract Address is:
0xE8Fb71d221DfCC1A77aC6Df5FcD1ed2EbdE32D3a
Copy/paste into etherscan to see token information
