Exclusive: Paragon Post-ICO Interview with Cryptovest; SEC, Blockchain, Cannabis and More

Interview Transcript

Natasha: OK, welcome guys, welcome to Cryptovest post-ICO review. Today we’ve got Gareth and Jessica in from Paragon Coin. Jessica is CEO, and Gareth is Chief Business Officer. Welcome Guys.

Gareth: Hi, thank you, Natasha.

N: So guys, first I want to congratulate you on an incredible ICO raise. A real achievement; seventeen million.

J: Oh, thank you for that. The number, though, we’re not really going to take congratulations for yet, because we’re still in the middle of doing our auditing. But, but thank you in general.

N: It was a good raise. I’m also going to commiserate [with, ed.] you guys because I did see that recently you’ve had a lawsuit filed against Paragon Coin for violating a securities law. And I don’t think there’s a founder out there that doesn’t have huge sympathy with you right now, knowing what a massively tricky area this is to create an ICO and you know, have to deal with the SEC legislation.

H: Yeah, thank you. I mean, unfortunately to me, to Gareth, to everyone in this company, it’s a norm for doing business in the U.S. Like, in a way, it’s this legal form of racketeering and in my personal opinion it’s unconstitutional for both sides of the lawsuit. Lawyers are clearly abusing this practice, especially in the U.S. For example, many of our community members just loved the idea described in our Paragon white paper and bought PRG tokens because they trusted what we were going to deliver and trusted what we promised to deliver, but there’s, like I said, unfortunately, lawyers that are just trying to bring this complicated nature of the securities laws that, uh, that we believe are not even applicable to our case in hopes of just getting a settlement. I mean, we know that that’s all they want.

They know that they’re not going to win, they want just some sort of settlement and I’ve seen a lot of ads on Twitter and on Google from these lawyers trying to find any plaintiffs to join their case against Paragon. And they’re talking about PRG purchasers losing money if they either – you know, it’s like they either don’t understand, or they’ just pretending not to understand that it’s not about the loss of money. It would be a loss of money if we failed to build what we promised, but so far we’ve been on track on with our road map and we’ve been successful in achieving everything that we’ve promised in our white paper to these lines, deadlines of our roadmap. Umm, and we’re optimistic that we’ll beat our own deadlines; to be honest, we’ve already done it with some of them. And frankly, I see this as abusive to our community, to us, to the team.

H: Well, how are you going to handle this? You know, [Are, ed.] you guys goin’ to lawyer up? You know, what’s your strategy on this to handle this?

W: Yeah, well, from the very beginning we took this extremely seriously and we strapped up with lawyers from the very, very, very beginning before we even announced what we were doing, so, we’ve been prepared and done everything that we can from the very beginning and with staying within regulation so we had lawyers then, we still have lawyers now. Some of our lawyers have even worked in the SEC before, so we’re not threatened or worried, or - we’re not worried about the securities laws that these other little lawyers are trying to come after us for.

N: Umm, I want to touch on a few different topics, yeah, the first one is your road map, yeah. So, I went and I had a look at the site and I can see that you posted a demo of the Paragon ledger, yeah. And for people out there, what does ‘demo’ mean. Is this a live NVP on the chain or this a just a mock-up, a click-through mock up.

G: Well, the supply tracking on blockchain, that was a sneak peak, and essentially what we wanted to do there is demonstrate our proof of concept of how this was going to work. Since wire contracts are relatively new, and storing data in them for a supply chain is also a new concept, what we wanted to do is show people how that worked, how we’re going to approach it and why it’s a better approach. Ahm, so it’s not a live demo yet that people can use, it was just a demonstration of how we’re doing that now today.

N: OK, so guys, how are you on your DAPS marketplace, where are you build-wise?

G: We’re currently still working on our beta, so our team is currently working on the development, that’s something we’re trying to expedite as soon as possible, but naturally we don’t want to end up releasing several elements in a slow paced manner. We’d rather get a full suite ready and release that in one go and make sure that functionality wise everything is right and we beta test it as much as possible.

N: OK cool. Guys, I want to ask you some questions around the team because there have been questions thrown