PotCoin: Can the Cryptocurrency for Cannabis Live up to Its Hype?

In early 2014, around the time retail cannabis stores opened in Colorado, news reports heralded the arrival of a digital currency for the legal cannabis market. PotCoin was supposed to allow consumers to buy or sell marijuana anonymously without using cash. At least one dispensary installed an ATM linked to the cryptocurrency.

And then PotCoin fell into obscurity. Within months, the headlines and news stories dried up. PotCoin has been live since its 2014 launch, but it’s failed to drum up a serious following. The currency was eventually taken over by a new set of administrators, including the developer of PotWallet, a PayPal-esque service created to make using PotCoin more practical.

Hype springs eternal, and now, more than two years after the vaporware debut of PotCoin, there may be reason for it to flow anew. With what the company characterizes as “substantial” new investor funding, PotCoin’s administrators are overhauling the currency. “There was a lack of IT manpower,” said David Amitrano, a pseudonym for the chief technology officer of the mysterious Montreal company behind these ventures (PotCoin’s leaders, like many cryptocurrency creators, put a premium on privacy). As with Bitcoin, PotCoin is open-source, so improvements can come from the company’s administers or via public submissions.

The company has no mobile app at the moment, but Amitrano says one is in the works for Android, iPhone, and Windows. The company says it’s on the verge of making public announcements about improvements to its products, but it hasn’t yet set a date to do so. “Pretty soon,” is all Amitrano would say.

Among other internal changes, the company acquired its own data center in Montreal. “We’re going to own 100 percent of our hardware and our network,” Amitrano said. “Everything is being refactored. Our biggest concerns are reliability, scalability, and security.”

Amitrano said there is no way to know how many users own PotCoins, or how much money the currency adds up to in the real world. Chatter in online forums—like its own, and one on Reddit—is sedate, as is activity on Facebook and among its 437 Instagram followers. On its website, PotCoin lists just 12 businesses that accept the currency. PotWallet has been available since its debut about a year after PotCoin, and today has around 3,000 active users, Amitrano said.

Both PotCoin and PotWallet can be used without fees. Consumers pay zilch. PotCoin promises transactions within just 40 seconds, a speedy clip compared with BitCoin’s 10-minute slog. 

That’s one of the things that makes PotCoin most promising, said Shad Ewart, a community college professor in Maryland who teaches one of the country’s only cannabusiness courses. Fast transactions would be imperative for a customer-merchant payment service, he said.