Interview with Wil Ralston, President of SinglePoint
For this interview, we caught up with Wil Ralston, the president of SinglePoint. At the time of this interview, SinglePoint was preparing to release a cryptocurrency payment solution for the cannabis industry.
HH: Can you tell me a little bit about Single Point?
Wil Ralston: Yeah, that’s fine. So Single Point, its history has always been a technology company with a major focus in mobile payments that stem from text messaging. We developed mobile payments via text messaging and since then, we’ve continued to innovate on mobile payments technology, but also have sort of rolling up companies through acquisition. Right now we’re focused in the cannabis space and working on developing a solution that will allow digital payments that are not cash.
HH: Awesome. I saw you’re working on soft launching a Bitcoin exchange for the cannabis industry. Why cannabis in particular?
Wil Ralston: Yes, so we’re launching an exchange and it’ll allow dispensaries, cultivators to actually process transactions through Bitcoin, which have a nice little site on app.singleseed.com that you can go to and register and set up your account. Once you set that account up, it’s actually an easy way for not only the consumers to obtain Bitcoin, but also for merchants to list their goods for sale and be able to accept Bitcoin for payment on their product.
HH: It sounds to me like you’re taking a little different angle to solving the dispensary’s payment problem.
Wil Ralston: That’s what we’re trying to do. We are taking a different angle. A lot of people are out there trying to actually solve it from the dispensary’s side, from that standpoint. But at the end of the day, you know, they can take cash and while it is a pain, they’re still able to accept payment. But we’re trying to focus on consumer adoption because in 2014, we had actually announced and worked on launching and getting a Bitcoin exchange for the cannabis industry, but consumers had not idea exactly what Bitcoin was done with that and now that’s no longer the case, many people around the world now know what Bitcoin is, we’re looking for a way to make those transactions happen and we’re focusing on consumer adoption and once we get the consumer adoption above a certain point, we believe we’ll have a strong shot at getting merchant adoption as well.
HH: Does Single Point have any competition in this niche?
Wil Ralston: I think that there’s a lot of people trying to work on solving the same problem of payments in the cannabis industry, so, yeah, it’s a competition. Is it direct? I don’t know. But we are excited to be one of the first ones to actually launch a solution we believe is going to be very viable.
HH: What does AppSwarm bring to the table as a partner in this project?
Wil Ralston: They are very technical. They are very—they have a lot of experience and deep experience in technology and they’ve done a lot of integration with point of sale machines and what we really love to work with them on is actually instead of having a merchant come to us to upload their product, there are two different portals. We actually have them tie in directly to the point of sale machine, so when that merchant goes to sell a product, it just populates, logs everything, and populates on our end with a price and they’re able to scan the consumer’s bar code to collect payment.
Very, very similar to a Starbucks solution where the consumer can load up their Bitcoin wallet, the merchant is able to populate a price for the product that they’re selling and just use that traditional bar code scanner to accept payment.
HH: Awesome. Are there any other projects that Single Point is working on?
Wil Ralston: Yeah. We work on a lot of different stuff, but the main one that we’re working on are the Bitcoin one I just explained and we’re also working on a track and trace solution with another partner. We believe that that’s going to be fantastic because once that’s implemented on the track and trace side, we can actually tie our payment system into it as well.
Now we’re no longer consuming, just providing on the consumer to this entry level, also collecting payments on the blockchain or to processor to retail. We actually could get our hands into every single point where that product changes hand and goes up for sale.
HH: That’s all the questions I have. Anything you’d like to add?
Wil Ralston: No, I just appreciate you taking this time. I’m all good to go. I appreciate it.
HH: Thank you.
Wil Ralston: Thanks. I really look forward to seeing your article and I’m assuming you’ll be able to share that with us so we can share it through our channels as well?
HH: Sure. I’ll send you a link when I get it up.
Wil Ralston: Fantastic. Thank you so much. You have a great day.
HH: You, too.
