When Mowgli Holmes and his childhood friend Nishan Karassik founded Phylos Bioscience in 2014 they had one major goal: to provide more transparency in the cannabis industry. That “and science, truth, consistency—and better weed,” Holmes wrote me in an email back in 2017.

They never could have guessed in 2014 that within a few years, they would be the subject of suspicion and outright contempt in some quarters of the tight-knit cannabis-growing world. But maybe they should have, because the transition from the illicit trade in marijuana to the mostly licit cannabis industry was never going to be without its complications and conflicts. Large science firms and Big Agriculture see an opportunity. Little cannabis sees a threat.

One of the first services Phylos launched was a “plant sex test,” which saves pot growers time and money by determining the sex of a seedling within a week of germination. (Only female cannabis plants contain usable amounts of THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids, so you want to cull the males ASAP.)

The company also began a collaboration with Rob DeSalle, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and professor at Columbia University, to sequence the DNA of as many cultivated varieties of cannabis (or cultivars) as possible to shed some light on the plant’s evolution. The results were published—on April 20, 2016, 4/20 naturally—in an open source forum called the Galaxy.

A splashy visual representation of the genetic relationships between cannabis varieties, the Galaxy is also, in essence, a road map for breeders. At first, the Phylos Galaxy was a kind of community science project—anyone who sent in tiny piece of stem (swabbed with alcohol to remove any traces of THC) got their cultivars genetically sequenced for free. (A fee was added later.)

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Cannabis

But later in 2016, Phylos began offering a “plant genotype test,” which included a placement on the Galaxy as well as a full report on its relationship to other cultivars. Because the Galaxy is public, it allows any breeder, scientist, or curious pot consumer to see how their favorite cultivar fits into the big picture—and it also helps growers decide what to breed next. (The farther apart two plants are genetically, the more likely they are to yield a plant with higher vigor and more disease resistance.)

Genotyping also offers a quick fact-check, allowing growers to know if they’re mislabeling cultivars—which, due to the clandestine nature of the black market, happens with some regularity. From the beginning, Phylos positioned itself as a “new kind of agriculture company,” one that mistrusted Monsanto and championed small-scale growers and breeders, the people responsible for the vast genetic diversity in the cannabis category. At last count, the Phylos Galaxy had 3,000 samples from 80 different countries, making it the largest database of cannabis genetics in the world.

So when Holmes announced on April 16 via Instagram that Phylos would be launching its own breeding program in a facility west of Portland, it wasn’t all hearts and smiley faces. Many in the cannabis community were outraged. “How about staying in your lane,” said one early response. “Damn, maybe you really have been stealing genetics this entire time,” began another. And finally: “Every idiot that allowed your company to put their genetics into their system just lost all their intellectual property.”

At first glance, the haters’ comments might’ve been dismissed as paranoia, jealousy, or at the very least anti-science. After all, you can’t resurrect a cannabis plant from a dead stem and 2,000 sites on the genome, which was all Phylos was sequencing.

But a few days later, a video surfaced that showed Holmes pitching investors at the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Miami in February. In it, Holmes tells a roomful of would-be investors that Phylos has a huge lead as a cannabis breeder. “We’ve been collecting data and IP for four years. We have really huge barriers to entry protecting us,” and that “we have more trust in the cannabis industry than any other science company.”