The Trade to Black podcast, hosted by Shadd Dales and Anthony Varrell and presented by FlowHub, opened its Thursday episode with a look at the latest in the cannabis industry news, including an analysis of the SAM lawsuit challenging rescheduling. Segment #1 features LEEF Brands (OTCQB: LEEEF) Board Member Jamie Mendola who explains why scale in California can still be a strategic advantage despite the state’s well‑known challenges. Plus in Segment #2, FundCanna CEO Adam Stettner returns with big news that company announced this morning: FundCanna is integrating ReadyPaid BNPL directly into Apex Trading’s $150M monthly marketplace.
In rescheduling news, the legal challenge, filed by the National Drug Testing Association (NDASA) and MMJ International Holdings, targets the procedural path used by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to move cannabis to Schedule III — specifically, his use of a treaty clause to bypass the standard DEA hearing process.
The first guest segment welcomed Jamie Mendola, board member and investor at LEEF Brands, for his debut appearance on the program. Speaking from San Francisco, Mendola offered a broad assessment of cannabis valuations in the current environment, arguing that while uplisting and rescheduling are meaningful catalysts, the industry’s next challenge is demonstrating revenue growth after several years of flat performance. He drew on his background as a hedge fund manager to explain why liquidity is the single most important factor for institutional investors — funds managing hundreds of millions of dollars will not enter positions they cannot exit cleanly, making Trulieve’s growing daily trading volume a genuinely positive signal for the sector.
Mendola then detailed what drew him to LEEF Brands specifically. The company operates primarily as a behind-the-scenes ingredient supplier — providing high-quality distillate, live resin, and solventless oil to leading California brands — rather than competing with them directly at retail. A key development has been the company’s 1,900-acre ranch in Santa Barbara County, where LEEF grows cannabis biomass at approximately eight dollars per pound, compared to the roughly twenty to thirty dollars per pound it would otherwise pay to source externally.
The final segment featured Adam Stettner, CEO of FundCanna, who discussed two recent announcements. The first was a benchmarking tool that allows cannabis retailers to compare their inventory efficiency and capital deployment against the top-performing operators in FundCanna’s database of over 6,000 underwritten files — a resource that addresses the lack of industry-wide benchmarking data that operators in other sectors take for granted. The second and more significant announcement was the embedding of FundCanna’s ReadyPaid buy-now-pay-later product directly into Apex Trading’s marketplace, which processes approximately $150 million in wholesale cannabis transactions per month. The integration allows buyers to be underwritten in roughly seven minutes, receive inventory immediately, and pay over time as they generate revenue — while sellers receive payment on day zero.
This and more when you tune in.
