Ron Strider
Well-Known Member
Born at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and raised in Oklahoma and Iowa, Jessica VerSteeg was always the creative free spirit in a family of no-nonsense IT professionals. Her parents worked on sensitive Air Force IT projects. She attended a private Christian school and Bible studies but dropped out of college to pursue her passion for modeling, culminating in a Miss Iowa crown in 2014. "Ever since I was little," VerSteeg says with a laugh, "I wanted to play dress-up and take my selfies."
But then a personal tragedy involving a close friend upended her life. VerSteeg became an atheist and founded a cannabis company, AUBox. Now, VerSteeg, 30, is attempting to standardize and modernize the poorly regulated, somewhat shady and largely illicit medical marijuana industry. VerSteeg has formed a cannabis-related blockchain platform company, Paragon, of which she is CEO and founder. And this Friday, she will launch an ambitious crowdsale for a related crypto-token, ParagonCoin (PRG), to facilitate the blockchain transactions.
Blockchain, which The Economist has labeled "The Trust Machine," is a distributed ledger that creates immutable, tamper-proof records of transactions and smart contracts to enable logic and automation.
[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative, and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
The glamorous model is just one of the colorful characters who inhabit the blockchain space and whose innovative efforts with this esoteric technology could disrupt and reshape the world's economy, including the estimated $100 billion cannabis industry.
VerSteeg's blockchain epiphany and other similar efforts have implications well beyond cannabis and could extend to the entire $2.4 trillion agricultural sectors, says David Sontsebo, a futurist and blockchain veteran who is the founder of IOTA. The influential Berlin-based nonprofit foundation has created a next-gen distributed ledger technology called Tangle, which Paragon will be deploying.
Recording immutable and verifiable agricultural data obtained from sensors, could for example, prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions of honeybees across the Western world by rewarding and/or pressuring farmers into adopting sustainable practices. "Proving that someone has abused the amount of pesticides and herbicides is very important," says Sontsebo, "and also being able to prove that something is grown with a certain soil, with a certain amount of pH value, that you can optimize the crop itself."
And Sontsebo notes that though Paragon's immediate focus is the cannabis crop itself, the true value of the platform could eventually be neither weed, nor seed, but all of the underlying data. "We're living in the era of big data. And data is the new oil, so to speak," says Sontsebo. "So indeed, I do believe that's a complete new revenue stream that people haven't even thought of."
Heavy Hitters
Backing VerSteeg in her venture is Egor Lavrov, 36, her wealthy Russian-technocrat husband and Paragon's Chief Creative Officer. Lavrov is bringing the same counterintuitive thinking that made him a multimillionaire at age 16 to building the open-source Paragon platform. "What we're planning to do is not an existing business model," Lavrov says. "But we are in a very innovative space, and we are innovating the business model as well."
Lavrov has the help of an old network of Russian crypto-millionaires and a young team of Ukrainian developers who recently arrived in the U.S. and are holed up in the couple's brand-new San Francisco Bay area home, scarfing pizzas and Chinese food as they code their way to the Sept. 15 token launch and Oct. 22 platform launch.
In addition to the last-minute technical hurdles, VerSteeg and Lavrov have been battling a relentless wave of DDOS and anonymous troll attacks and crypto extortion attempts over the past two weeks that have taken an emotional toll on the couple. "This is the hardest thing that I have ever done," Lavrov says.
I met VerSteeg and Lavrov in late August in the lounge of the Four Seasons in downtown New York. VerSteeg was dressed in a black Michael Kors sweater and bias-cut skirt with big silver buttons and Gianvito Rossi stilettos. Lavrov was designer casual in contrast, in Dolce & Gabbana jeans, a Loro Piana lavender cotton checked shirt and Adidas N-M-D sneakers.
The tony hotel and millionaire lifestyle is a far cry from VerSteeg's simple, conservative childhood, which she remembers with mixed emotions. Her parents' marriage foundered after her Puerto Rican mom was posted to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, leaving behind young Jessica, who was just 3 years old, and her 4-month-old twin sisters. After the parents' divorce, the kids remained with VerSteeg's mom in Midwest City, Oklahoma. Her dad, who is of Dutch origin, moved to Virginia to work at the Pentagon. But the girls spent summers and Christmas with their dad in his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa. In 2001, VerSteeg, then 14, moved to Oskaloosa to live full-time with her dad, an eventful decision that would push her into her cannabis career and ultimately return her to her family's IT roots and the arcane world of blockchain technology.
Fateful Romance
In October 2011, when she was deep into her modeling career but returning home for visits to Oskaloosa, VerSteeg became involved with her childhood friend Tyler Sash, a handsome former standout safety for the University of Iowa who would soon win a Super Bowl during his rookie season with the New York Giants. They were both between relationships. She was home to see her sisters and he was on his bye week. "From that point on," VerSteeg says, "we knew we were meant to be together."
But it was not to be. Sash was always in pain, from cuts and bruises and falls, a chronic shoulder injury and concussions, says VerSteeg. "We could have no white sheets during season. He was always bleeding." She remembers Sash telling her that he had more than a dozen surgical pins in his shoulders. He'd had ankle surgery and had trouble walking. "He looked," VerSteeg says, "like an 80-year-old man."
Sash begged her to let him smoke marijuana, like the other players. "And he said, 'Jess, can I smoke? I'm afraid I'll get addicted to the painkillers, and I need something else for my pain,'" VerSteeg recalls. "And I didn't know there was such a thing as addiction to painkillers. I don't know. I was very naïve. And I said, 'No, Ty, you have to trust these NFL doctors; you'll never get addicted. Marijuana is a bad drug. What if you randomly get tested, it could jeopardize your career or end your career. Let's just be smart.'"
Downward Spiral
According to ESPN, in July 2012, just months after his Super Bowl victory, the NFL suspended Sash for four games after he tested positive for the stimulant Adderall, used to treat attention deficit and sleep disorders.
After two seasons with the Giants and a multitude of injuries, including a dislocated shoulder, Sash was cut from the roster before the 2013 opener, with an injury settlement for a concussion. By then he had suffered five concussions, the maximum allowed under NFL rules, says VerSteeg. Sash and VerSteeg returned home to Iowa, "where he was vomiting every day," VerSteeg says, "and sleeping anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a day. Just sleeping. And becoming aggressive. Doing strange things."
In May 2014, according to ESPN, Oskaloosa police shot the athlete with a Taser and arrested him after he led them on a drunken scooter chase. VerSteeg stood by him even as his physical and mental condition and their relationship deteriorated. Then one day, she discovered what was exacerbating Sash's erratic behavior. He was experiencing incontinence by then, and VerSteeg, often left to clean up after him, found a pile of undissolved pills.
"And I had this exact flashback to that moment in New Jersey," recalls VerSteeg, "when he asked if he could smoke weed instead of becoming addicted."
Cannabis (botanical name Cannabis sativa L., legal name marijuana) – though not rigorously tested – is believed by advocates to have potential benefits for conditions including chemotherapy, chronic pain and muscle spasms. It is a Schedule 1 drug under the federal 1970 Controlled Substances Act. The Drug Enforcement Administration says the current weight of evidence shows that smoked marijuana has a "high potential for abuse, and has no accepted medical value" and that there is a "general lack of accepted safety for its use even under medical supervision." The National Institute on Drug Abuse says marijuana use "can lead to the development of problem use, known as a marijuana use disorder, which takes the form of addiction in severe cases." There are roughly 17,000 prescription opioid overdose deaths a year, but there is no known recorded case of a marijuana overdose, leading advocates to push for its legalization as a safer plant-based alternative to synthetic pain killers.
VerSteeg went through Sash's phone to see what drugs he was taking because he had ripped all the labels from the vials. "And I would always see him Googling, 'How many pills can I take of this and this without dying?'" VerSteeg says. "He wanted to take the maximum amount."
Eventually, after a relationship of nearly three years, VerSteeg – at the behest of her parents and for her own safety and sanity – left Sash and moved to San Francisco.
Terrible Tragedy
In August 2015, Sash asked VerSteeg to visit him in Oskaloosa. She told him she would see him in October when she returned home to attend her father's wedding. But on Sept. 8, Sash was found dead in his home. He was just 27 years old. "I never made it to see him," VerSteeg says.
According to news reports, the medical examiner ruled an accidental overdose of a mix of two highly addictive painkillers, hydrocodone and methadone. His family later released results of tests performed on his brain confirming that Sash had Stage 2 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that affects many football players. "He had one of the worst cases of CTE in his age," VerSteeg says.
In a twist of bitter irony, Sash died unaware that VerSteeg herself had begun to experiment with and sell cannabis. Everyone around her in San Francisco, even her doctor, was smoking weed, she says. A friend taught VerSteeg about the medical uses of marijuana and took her to Hippy Hill in Golden Gate Park and rolled a joint for her. VerSteeg, who's a foodie, was inspired by Michelin star desserts and began baking marijuana cookies, cupcakes, and other desserts with edible 24-karat gold, which she sold in boxes at the local park and at parties. She then quietly started a monthly subscription marijuana service in the Bay Area. Inspired by the success of her gold-flecked desserts, VerSteeg named the company AUBox; Au is the chemical symbol for gold.
She still doesn't know why she never told Sash of her change of heart about cannabis and about her new venture. "I was ignorant," VerSteeg says. "I was embarrassed to say it; he's now gone."
Web Designer with Designs
Last year, determined to convert her sorrow into positive action, VerSteeg participated in the 28th season of The Amazing Race. She also decided to go public and promote medical marijuana. "I'm tired of hiding behind a pretty image," she says. "I want to change this."
Emboldened, VerSteeg decided to launch AUBox nationwide. One day, frustrated with her search for a web designer, she sought advice from Lavrov, whom she'd met in Miami during her modeling days and with whom she'd been friends for a decade.
Lavrov, a multimillionaire serial entrepreneur, is CEO of an advertising mediation platform, Peak Mediation, and manages a VC fund, Zila Ventures. He offered to design VerSteeg's website for free, she says, smiling, because he'd long had a romantic interest in her, but VerSteeg insisted on paying for it at cost. One thing led to another and their friendship evolved into romance after Sash's death. (Lavros had waited years to ask her out because he wanted her on the right terms, not on the rebound from other men, and not in grief from Sash, she says.) They were married on April 20 – National Marijuana Day – known in the cannabis community simply as 4/20. They were spending the weekend in Las Vegas. "We went to the Bellagio. And they had the chapel available," VerSteeg says, "and we got married. I called my parents and said 'Guys, watch it live.' And I sent them the link."
They've been inseparable since. Lavrov describes her as a "stigma hunter" because of her desire to change the public's and government's mind-set on medical marijuana.
As she became steeped in the cannabis industry, VerSteeg began to see inconsistencies in lab purity results, difficulties in patient verifications, and numerous data integrity problems. Separately, over the years, as she began investing in cryptocurrency and through her friendship with Lavrov, she came to understand blockchain, the distributed ledger technology underlying crypto. Intuitively putting two and two together, VerSteeg realized what AUBox needed was a blockchain. "I wasn't thinking of anyone else to see it," VerSteeg says. "I didn't think larger."
She once again turned to Lavrov for technical help. But as Lavrov's team started building it, VerSteeg saw how a blockchain platform could benefit the whole cannabis community.
"Right now, regulations are different from county to county, state to state, let alone country to country," VerSteeg says. "So, once you can prove that it all meets up to the same standard, people will start to feel comfortable with it and it takes away this bad, dark image that it has."
The Paragon Platform
ParagonChain, as the blockchain platform is called, is designed to connect all the cannabis players through an open-source blockchain network – currently being built on Ethereum, though eventually the whole platform likely will shift to IOTA's Tangle – with different data access rules or permissions for different participants. "Each person, from dispensaries to growers to doctors to patients," says VerSteeg, "will have different limitations on what they're able to use on our App." [Disclosure: I own Ethereum's token, ether.]
Because of federal patient privacy rules known as HIPAA, patient data would be stored off the blockchain. But verification of their data would take place on the distributed ledger. "If he's my doctor, he gave me my prescription. You're a dispensary, and now I have my approval," says VerSteeg. "You cannot see my medical history, but what you can see is my doctor's name, my expiration date, and like a blue check thing saying this is a valid ID saying I can buy medical marijuana."
The ParagonCoin (PRG) public crowdsale token launch this Friday (100 million tokens are up for sale at $1 per token) will attempt to solve the biggest problem confronting the industry, which VerSteeg and Lavrov view as a huge opportunity. Because use, sale, and possession of cannabis are illegal under federal law (29 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws), every aspect of the industry is cash-based today because, by law, the proceeds can't be put in a bank. That means cash payments for growers, buyers, sellers, PR firms, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, landlords and delivery people.
This is not only inconvenient and inefficient but also downright dangerous. Cannabis sellers such as VerSteeg have to move around with large bags of cash, protected by bodyguards, as they carry out their day-to-day business.
Lavrov notes that even cannabis taxes have to be paid in cash. "Federal government has issues with this money being banked," he says with a grin, "but no issues accepting at the IRS."
VerSteeg's and Lavrov's goal is to take a chunk out of this cash-based industry and convert it into crypto through the PRG token. "If we move just 1% of the industry's cash into PRG," says Lavrov quietly, "you can imagine the value. It's a $100 billion industry."
Paragon members would use PRG to pay for all the platform's services and benefits except buying or selling of the drug, which would be illegal. In fact, Lavrov says, if anyone attempts to use PRG to buy or sell cannabis, Paragon will report them to the authorities to stay in full compliance with the law.
"Our business is not touching the substance itself in any way," says Lavrov. "So even though we are a cannabis-related startup, we're not buying, not selling, not creating a market for cannabis itself."
Membership Privileges
The token launch also would be used to buy Paragon real estate around the world to build shared ParagonSpace offices that members could rent using PRG. Currently, cannabis workspaces are prohibitively expensive and often tough, if not impossible to find, given the federal law and so-called Green Zone local zoning restrictions.
And finally, members could use tokens to cast votes on all issues important to the community, such as where Paragon shared office spaces will be located and how community reserve funds should be spent. "They are not doing this ad hoc, hey, let's get a quick money grab," says IOTA's Sontsebo. "By doing it the way they are doing it, at least as defined in the white paper, they are creating a very collective community effort around it, and I believe that's a very good approach."
It hasn't been easy pulling off such an ambitious project. In addition to the recent 24/7 DDOS and troll attacks and numerous extortion attempts, the token presale itself has been exhausting, with Lavrov subsisting on 30-minute naps, as emails and calls come in from around the world. Lavrov says he sometimes rolls off the couch and ends up on the floor, to the amusement of their French Bulldog and company mascot, Priscilla.
But the tech-savvy Lavrov appears to have as good a shot of pulling it off as anyone. Regarded as one of the fathers of the Russian internet, Lavrov's early work in his birth country not only made him enormously wealthy but also earned him connections that have become invaluable now, two decades later, with the Paragon token launch. Lavrov, like VerSteeg, has his own dramatic tale of adversity and triumph, which he recounts as we leave the Four Seasons and head over to Yahoo News, where VerSteeg is due for an interview.
It's a gray, rainy day in New York. We're riding in a leather-lined rented Mercedes Sprinter van driven by a silver-haired Polish man named Felix, who seems tickled pink to be escorting VerSteeg around, holding an umbrella protectively over her, and at one point, deftly helping her maneuver cobblestones in her impractical designer stilettos, when Lavrov forgets to do so. "I'm sorry. Forgive me," Lavrov says to VerSteeg, shaking his head in chagrin, as the van leaves the curb. "Will you keep me around?" She assures him she will. As we wait for the elevator at Yahoo News, I ask VerSteeg which clothing designer is her favorite. "YSL, of course," Lavrov interjects, smiling, pointing to his wife's small black cross-body bag with the gold Yves Saint Laurent logo. "Because those are my initials, you see, YSL."
News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: The Iowa Beauty Queen, The Russian Technocrat And Their Cannabis Crypto Launch
Author: Chitra Ragavan
Contact: Contact Information
Photo Credit: Michelle Monique
Website: {{meta.title}}
But then a personal tragedy involving a close friend upended her life. VerSteeg became an atheist and founded a cannabis company, AUBox. Now, VerSteeg, 30, is attempting to standardize and modernize the poorly regulated, somewhat shady and largely illicit medical marijuana industry. VerSteeg has formed a cannabis-related blockchain platform company, Paragon, of which she is CEO and founder. And this Friday, she will launch an ambitious crowdsale for a related crypto-token, ParagonCoin (PRG), to facilitate the blockchain transactions.
Blockchain, which The Economist has labeled "The Trust Machine," is a distributed ledger that creates immutable, tamper-proof records of transactions and smart contracts to enable logic and automation.
[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative, and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
The glamorous model is just one of the colorful characters who inhabit the blockchain space and whose innovative efforts with this esoteric technology could disrupt and reshape the world's economy, including the estimated $100 billion cannabis industry.
VerSteeg's blockchain epiphany and other similar efforts have implications well beyond cannabis and could extend to the entire $2.4 trillion agricultural sectors, says David Sontsebo, a futurist and blockchain veteran who is the founder of IOTA. The influential Berlin-based nonprofit foundation has created a next-gen distributed ledger technology called Tangle, which Paragon will be deploying.
Recording immutable and verifiable agricultural data obtained from sensors, could for example, prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions of honeybees across the Western world by rewarding and/or pressuring farmers into adopting sustainable practices. "Proving that someone has abused the amount of pesticides and herbicides is very important," says Sontsebo, "and also being able to prove that something is grown with a certain soil, with a certain amount of pH value, that you can optimize the crop itself."
And Sontsebo notes that though Paragon's immediate focus is the cannabis crop itself, the true value of the platform could eventually be neither weed, nor seed, but all of the underlying data. "We're living in the era of big data. And data is the new oil, so to speak," says Sontsebo. "So indeed, I do believe that's a complete new revenue stream that people haven't even thought of."
Heavy Hitters
Backing VerSteeg in her venture is Egor Lavrov, 36, her wealthy Russian-technocrat husband and Paragon's Chief Creative Officer. Lavrov is bringing the same counterintuitive thinking that made him a multimillionaire at age 16 to building the open-source Paragon platform. "What we're planning to do is not an existing business model," Lavrov says. "But we are in a very innovative space, and we are innovating the business model as well."
Lavrov has the help of an old network of Russian crypto-millionaires and a young team of Ukrainian developers who recently arrived in the U.S. and are holed up in the couple's brand-new San Francisco Bay area home, scarfing pizzas and Chinese food as they code their way to the Sept. 15 token launch and Oct. 22 platform launch.
In addition to the last-minute technical hurdles, VerSteeg and Lavrov have been battling a relentless wave of DDOS and anonymous troll attacks and crypto extortion attempts over the past two weeks that have taken an emotional toll on the couple. "This is the hardest thing that I have ever done," Lavrov says.
I met VerSteeg and Lavrov in late August in the lounge of the Four Seasons in downtown New York. VerSteeg was dressed in a black Michael Kors sweater and bias-cut skirt with big silver buttons and Gianvito Rossi stilettos. Lavrov was designer casual in contrast, in Dolce & Gabbana jeans, a Loro Piana lavender cotton checked shirt and Adidas N-M-D sneakers.
The tony hotel and millionaire lifestyle is a far cry from VerSteeg's simple, conservative childhood, which she remembers with mixed emotions. Her parents' marriage foundered after her Puerto Rican mom was posted to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, leaving behind young Jessica, who was just 3 years old, and her 4-month-old twin sisters. After the parents' divorce, the kids remained with VerSteeg's mom in Midwest City, Oklahoma. Her dad, who is of Dutch origin, moved to Virginia to work at the Pentagon. But the girls spent summers and Christmas with their dad in his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa. In 2001, VerSteeg, then 14, moved to Oskaloosa to live full-time with her dad, an eventful decision that would push her into her cannabis career and ultimately return her to her family's IT roots and the arcane world of blockchain technology.
Fateful Romance
In October 2011, when she was deep into her modeling career but returning home for visits to Oskaloosa, VerSteeg became involved with her childhood friend Tyler Sash, a handsome former standout safety for the University of Iowa who would soon win a Super Bowl during his rookie season with the New York Giants. They were both between relationships. She was home to see her sisters and he was on his bye week. "From that point on," VerSteeg says, "we knew we were meant to be together."
But it was not to be. Sash was always in pain, from cuts and bruises and falls, a chronic shoulder injury and concussions, says VerSteeg. "We could have no white sheets during season. He was always bleeding." She remembers Sash telling her that he had more than a dozen surgical pins in his shoulders. He'd had ankle surgery and had trouble walking. "He looked," VerSteeg says, "like an 80-year-old man."
Sash begged her to let him smoke marijuana, like the other players. "And he said, 'Jess, can I smoke? I'm afraid I'll get addicted to the painkillers, and I need something else for my pain,'" VerSteeg recalls. "And I didn't know there was such a thing as addiction to painkillers. I don't know. I was very naïve. And I said, 'No, Ty, you have to trust these NFL doctors; you'll never get addicted. Marijuana is a bad drug. What if you randomly get tested, it could jeopardize your career or end your career. Let's just be smart.'"
Downward Spiral
According to ESPN, in July 2012, just months after his Super Bowl victory, the NFL suspended Sash for four games after he tested positive for the stimulant Adderall, used to treat attention deficit and sleep disorders.
After two seasons with the Giants and a multitude of injuries, including a dislocated shoulder, Sash was cut from the roster before the 2013 opener, with an injury settlement for a concussion. By then he had suffered five concussions, the maximum allowed under NFL rules, says VerSteeg. Sash and VerSteeg returned home to Iowa, "where he was vomiting every day," VerSteeg says, "and sleeping anywhere from 15 to 20 hours a day. Just sleeping. And becoming aggressive. Doing strange things."
In May 2014, according to ESPN, Oskaloosa police shot the athlete with a Taser and arrested him after he led them on a drunken scooter chase. VerSteeg stood by him even as his physical and mental condition and their relationship deteriorated. Then one day, she discovered what was exacerbating Sash's erratic behavior. He was experiencing incontinence by then, and VerSteeg, often left to clean up after him, found a pile of undissolved pills.
"And I had this exact flashback to that moment in New Jersey," recalls VerSteeg, "when he asked if he could smoke weed instead of becoming addicted."
Cannabis (botanical name Cannabis sativa L., legal name marijuana) – though not rigorously tested – is believed by advocates to have potential benefits for conditions including chemotherapy, chronic pain and muscle spasms. It is a Schedule 1 drug under the federal 1970 Controlled Substances Act. The Drug Enforcement Administration says the current weight of evidence shows that smoked marijuana has a "high potential for abuse, and has no accepted medical value" and that there is a "general lack of accepted safety for its use even under medical supervision." The National Institute on Drug Abuse says marijuana use "can lead to the development of problem use, known as a marijuana use disorder, which takes the form of addiction in severe cases." There are roughly 17,000 prescription opioid overdose deaths a year, but there is no known recorded case of a marijuana overdose, leading advocates to push for its legalization as a safer plant-based alternative to synthetic pain killers.
VerSteeg went through Sash's phone to see what drugs he was taking because he had ripped all the labels from the vials. "And I would always see him Googling, 'How many pills can I take of this and this without dying?'" VerSteeg says. "He wanted to take the maximum amount."
Eventually, after a relationship of nearly three years, VerSteeg – at the behest of her parents and for her own safety and sanity – left Sash and moved to San Francisco.
Terrible Tragedy
In August 2015, Sash asked VerSteeg to visit him in Oskaloosa. She told him she would see him in October when she returned home to attend her father's wedding. But on Sept. 8, Sash was found dead in his home. He was just 27 years old. "I never made it to see him," VerSteeg says.
According to news reports, the medical examiner ruled an accidental overdose of a mix of two highly addictive painkillers, hydrocodone and methadone. His family later released results of tests performed on his brain confirming that Sash had Stage 2 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that affects many football players. "He had one of the worst cases of CTE in his age," VerSteeg says.
In a twist of bitter irony, Sash died unaware that VerSteeg herself had begun to experiment with and sell cannabis. Everyone around her in San Francisco, even her doctor, was smoking weed, she says. A friend taught VerSteeg about the medical uses of marijuana and took her to Hippy Hill in Golden Gate Park and rolled a joint for her. VerSteeg, who's a foodie, was inspired by Michelin star desserts and began baking marijuana cookies, cupcakes, and other desserts with edible 24-karat gold, which she sold in boxes at the local park and at parties. She then quietly started a monthly subscription marijuana service in the Bay Area. Inspired by the success of her gold-flecked desserts, VerSteeg named the company AUBox; Au is the chemical symbol for gold.
She still doesn't know why she never told Sash of her change of heart about cannabis and about her new venture. "I was ignorant," VerSteeg says. "I was embarrassed to say it; he's now gone."
Web Designer with Designs
Last year, determined to convert her sorrow into positive action, VerSteeg participated in the 28th season of The Amazing Race. She also decided to go public and promote medical marijuana. "I'm tired of hiding behind a pretty image," she says. "I want to change this."
Emboldened, VerSteeg decided to launch AUBox nationwide. One day, frustrated with her search for a web designer, she sought advice from Lavrov, whom she'd met in Miami during her modeling days and with whom she'd been friends for a decade.
Lavrov, a multimillionaire serial entrepreneur, is CEO of an advertising mediation platform, Peak Mediation, and manages a VC fund, Zila Ventures. He offered to design VerSteeg's website for free, she says, smiling, because he'd long had a romantic interest in her, but VerSteeg insisted on paying for it at cost. One thing led to another and their friendship evolved into romance after Sash's death. (Lavros had waited years to ask her out because he wanted her on the right terms, not on the rebound from other men, and not in grief from Sash, she says.) They were married on April 20 – National Marijuana Day – known in the cannabis community simply as 4/20. They were spending the weekend in Las Vegas. "We went to the Bellagio. And they had the chapel available," VerSteeg says, "and we got married. I called my parents and said 'Guys, watch it live.' And I sent them the link."
They've been inseparable since. Lavrov describes her as a "stigma hunter" because of her desire to change the public's and government's mind-set on medical marijuana.
As she became steeped in the cannabis industry, VerSteeg began to see inconsistencies in lab purity results, difficulties in patient verifications, and numerous data integrity problems. Separately, over the years, as she began investing in cryptocurrency and through her friendship with Lavrov, she came to understand blockchain, the distributed ledger technology underlying crypto. Intuitively putting two and two together, VerSteeg realized what AUBox needed was a blockchain. "I wasn't thinking of anyone else to see it," VerSteeg says. "I didn't think larger."
She once again turned to Lavrov for technical help. But as Lavrov's team started building it, VerSteeg saw how a blockchain platform could benefit the whole cannabis community.
"Right now, regulations are different from county to county, state to state, let alone country to country," VerSteeg says. "So, once you can prove that it all meets up to the same standard, people will start to feel comfortable with it and it takes away this bad, dark image that it has."
The Paragon Platform
ParagonChain, as the blockchain platform is called, is designed to connect all the cannabis players through an open-source blockchain network – currently being built on Ethereum, though eventually the whole platform likely will shift to IOTA's Tangle – with different data access rules or permissions for different participants. "Each person, from dispensaries to growers to doctors to patients," says VerSteeg, "will have different limitations on what they're able to use on our App." [Disclosure: I own Ethereum's token, ether.]
Because of federal patient privacy rules known as HIPAA, patient data would be stored off the blockchain. But verification of their data would take place on the distributed ledger. "If he's my doctor, he gave me my prescription. You're a dispensary, and now I have my approval," says VerSteeg. "You cannot see my medical history, but what you can see is my doctor's name, my expiration date, and like a blue check thing saying this is a valid ID saying I can buy medical marijuana."
The ParagonCoin (PRG) public crowdsale token launch this Friday (100 million tokens are up for sale at $1 per token) will attempt to solve the biggest problem confronting the industry, which VerSteeg and Lavrov view as a huge opportunity. Because use, sale, and possession of cannabis are illegal under federal law (29 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws), every aspect of the industry is cash-based today because, by law, the proceeds can't be put in a bank. That means cash payments for growers, buyers, sellers, PR firms, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, landlords and delivery people.
This is not only inconvenient and inefficient but also downright dangerous. Cannabis sellers such as VerSteeg have to move around with large bags of cash, protected by bodyguards, as they carry out their day-to-day business.
Lavrov notes that even cannabis taxes have to be paid in cash. "Federal government has issues with this money being banked," he says with a grin, "but no issues accepting at the IRS."
VerSteeg's and Lavrov's goal is to take a chunk out of this cash-based industry and convert it into crypto through the PRG token. "If we move just 1% of the industry's cash into PRG," says Lavrov quietly, "you can imagine the value. It's a $100 billion industry."
Paragon members would use PRG to pay for all the platform's services and benefits except buying or selling of the drug, which would be illegal. In fact, Lavrov says, if anyone attempts to use PRG to buy or sell cannabis, Paragon will report them to the authorities to stay in full compliance with the law.
"Our business is not touching the substance itself in any way," says Lavrov. "So even though we are a cannabis-related startup, we're not buying, not selling, not creating a market for cannabis itself."
Membership Privileges
The token launch also would be used to buy Paragon real estate around the world to build shared ParagonSpace offices that members could rent using PRG. Currently, cannabis workspaces are prohibitively expensive and often tough, if not impossible to find, given the federal law and so-called Green Zone local zoning restrictions.
And finally, members could use tokens to cast votes on all issues important to the community, such as where Paragon shared office spaces will be located and how community reserve funds should be spent. "They are not doing this ad hoc, hey, let's get a quick money grab," says IOTA's Sontsebo. "By doing it the way they are doing it, at least as defined in the white paper, they are creating a very collective community effort around it, and I believe that's a very good approach."
It hasn't been easy pulling off such an ambitious project. In addition to the recent 24/7 DDOS and troll attacks and numerous extortion attempts, the token presale itself has been exhausting, with Lavrov subsisting on 30-minute naps, as emails and calls come in from around the world. Lavrov says he sometimes rolls off the couch and ends up on the floor, to the amusement of their French Bulldog and company mascot, Priscilla.
But the tech-savvy Lavrov appears to have as good a shot of pulling it off as anyone. Regarded as one of the fathers of the Russian internet, Lavrov's early work in his birth country not only made him enormously wealthy but also earned him connections that have become invaluable now, two decades later, with the Paragon token launch. Lavrov, like VerSteeg, has his own dramatic tale of adversity and triumph, which he recounts as we leave the Four Seasons and head over to Yahoo News, where VerSteeg is due for an interview.
It's a gray, rainy day in New York. We're riding in a leather-lined rented Mercedes Sprinter van driven by a silver-haired Polish man named Felix, who seems tickled pink to be escorting VerSteeg around, holding an umbrella protectively over her, and at one point, deftly helping her maneuver cobblestones in her impractical designer stilettos, when Lavrov forgets to do so. "I'm sorry. Forgive me," Lavrov says to VerSteeg, shaking his head in chagrin, as the van leaves the curb. "Will you keep me around?" She assures him she will. As we wait for the elevator at Yahoo News, I ask VerSteeg which clothing designer is her favorite. "YSL, of course," Lavrov interjects, smiling, pointing to his wife's small black cross-body bag with the gold Yves Saint Laurent logo. "Because those are my initials, you see, YSL."
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