100% of of these folks doing card-type payments are playing cat and mouse (I know because I'm very involved in this industry). Some don't tell their up-stream processors what they are doing. Others are constantly shifting their processing through various gateways. None of it currently runs on the credit-rails. But all the debit-rail processing is happening in a dark-grey area. One of these debit-rail providers has like four banking parterships per state they "work" in -- so when they strike out on one, they can move to another. You can observe that in the retail store when they say "oh, EBT isn't working today".

And more importantly, in 2014 when the regulated cannabis industry started -- electronic only would have blocked it -- or created an additional huge hurdle. It's taken eight years to get to this crap-tastick hack of workarounds and outright lies.