HempCoin Founder and CEO, Tim Renzetti, tells Cointelegraph about the token’s journey so far and plans for the future.
HempCoin (THC), one of the first 30 cryptocurrencies ever created, has been relisted by cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex. Before being delisted in 2019, HempCoin was a top-100 token on CoinMarketCap, trading over $10 million a day.
HempCoin founder and CEO Tim Renzetti spoke to Cointelegraph about the coin’s rejuvenation and his plans for future development of the platform.
Renzetti first discovered crypto in 2013 and started the HempCoin blockchain as a community project in December of that year. This preempted the farm bill of 2018, which paved the way for the legalization of cannabis in the United States. He said:
“My initial thought on crypto was that eventually industries and divisions of the economy would each gravitate towards one particular crypto. This would help maintain the value within each as, for example, if the oil industry collapses then the agriculture industry wouldn’t. I wanted HempCoin to be the Agriculture Coin, representing a 2 trillion dollar industry worldwide.”
Bittrex picked up HempCoin and listed THC on its exchange in March 2014. However, by the end of 2014 Renzetti had moved on to other non-crypto-related business ventures, in the belief that the project and community would tick along nicely without him.
He revisited the project in early 2017, when interest in all things crypto was starting to explode, and put together a direction and future plan that the community could work with.
During the crypto-boom of 2017, HempCoin soared in value, aided by an enhanced social media presence. It broke into the top-100 coins on CMC, hitting a peak market cap of $170 million in January 2018 and trading over $10 million per day on Bittrex.
Renzetti had big ideas to expand HempCoin by adding a seed-to-sale supply chain traceability platform called HempTRAC. This would have been aimed not just at the cannabis industry, but encompassing the whole of the agriculture and farming sector, he says:
“In 2018 I wanted to change our technology to have a data platform on the THC blockchain and brought on a project manager to help facilitate this change. Because I am not a coder and did not have a dev team I searched for teams that offered this solution.”
He settled on Komodo for its technical capabilities and security, and made agreements with Komodo and Bittrex to facilitate the change. Komodo was to create the new THC technology, while Bittrex was to migrate the code and convert old THC for new THC. At the time, over two-thirds of the total THC supply was held in customers wallets on the exchange.
“I paid both companies for the change and started the process,” said Renzetti “Unfortunately it fell foul of Bittrex’s developing legal and regulatory position. They announced THC was to be delisted which rocked our community.”
Renzetti has spent the last year trying to get relisted on Bittrex, acknowledging that the major exchange listing was always HempCoin’s biggest asset. Meanwhile, Bittrex has been limiting the coins that it supports in the U.S. and moving tokens to its Bittrex Global platform.
As of July 2020, HempCoin had finally been relisted with Bittrex Global. Renzetti now hopes to develop or fund the completion of the HempTRAC platform.
“The HempTRAC platform will encompass all facets of data pertaining to the agriculture/farming industry worldwide. We have many farmers waiting to utilize our platform to make it easier to manage the production supply chain.”
