The 2018 ICO circus did not suffer from a lack of ambition. It suffered from an excess of it, usually paired with thin documentation, vague promises, and founders who seemed convinced that saying “blockchain” with enough confidence counted as a business model. HIGHER, also known as HGR, landed squarely in that category. The pitch tried to merge cryptocurrency with the legal cannabis trade, which at first glance probably sounded irresistible to the sort of investor who liked combining fashionable buzzwords into improvised wealth strategies. In practice, the project looked far less like a serious financial innovation and far more like another opportunistic token sale trying to harvest whatever money was still floating around the market.
The concept itself was not impossible. The cannabis industry, especially in jurisdictions experimenting with legalization, has long faced banking restrictions, payment friction, and compliance headaches. A credible blockchain project could have tried to solve inventory tracking, payments, or cross-border settlement issues. But a real solution requires serious execution. That means transparent founders, verifiable development work, and a clear explanation of why a token is necessary instead of being decorative glitter sprinkled on an ordinary startup. HIGHER did not appear to clear those bars. Reports around the project pointed to weak founder verification, broken profile links, and almost no visible evidence that the technical side was being built with any seriousness.
That matters because the ICO market in 2018 was already full of copy-and-paste ideas wearing expensive slogans. Cannabis token, gaming token, social token, logistics token, loyalty token. Pick an industry, bolt on Ethereum, announce a cap, and wait for retail investors to arrive hoping the next thousand percent move had just appeared on their screens. Many of these projects were not solving a real problem. They were solving a fundraising problem for the people launching them.
HIGHER looked like a classic example of that era’s laziness. The soft cap and hard cap may have seemed modest enough to tempt speculators into tossing in a small amount “just in case,” which is exactly how weak projects survive longer than they should. It is never the giant polished frauds alone that drain a market. Plenty of damage is done by small, mediocre offerings that promise the future and deliver a burnt homepage, a half-finished wallet, and silence. Investors who wanted exposure to blockchain in emerging regulated industries had better options than this. The best interpretation of HIGHER was that it was underprepared. The worst interpretation was that it knew exactly what it was doing. Neither is an attractive investment thesis.
