De Beers Group is launching the Tracr™ blockchain platform at scale for its diamond production. Tracr™ is the world’s only distributed diamond blockchain that starts at the source and provides tamper-proof source assurance at scale, enabling Sightholders to provide an immutable record of a diamond’s provenance, and empowering jewellery retailers to have confidence in the origin of the diamonds they purchase.
With more end clients wanting to know the source of the products they buy, the deep meaning associated with a diamond purchase requires a technological step-change to meet their expectations. The introduction of Tracr™ at scale delivers immutable information on the source of De Beers’ diamonds across the value chain and makes source assurance for 100% of De Beers’ production possible.
The decentralised nature of the platform ensures its speed and scalability, with the ability to register one million diamonds a week onto the platform. With centralised platforms, dealing with large volumes of data can cause bottlenecks, but the decentralised model used by Tracr™ avoids such issues and enables rapid scaling.
The scalability, speed and security of Tracr™ are combined into an intuitive user experience to support ease of use for platform participants.
De Beers has already registered one quarter of its production by value on Tracr™ in the first three Sights of the year in preparation for this first scale release.
Bruce Cleaver, CEO, De Beers Group, said: “…With our long-term investment in Tracr™, we are proud to join with our Sightholders to provide the industry with immutable diamond source assurance at scale. Tracr™, which will enable the provision of provenance information from source to Sightholder to store on a secure blockchain, will underpin confidence in natural diamonds and represents the first step in a technological transformation that will enhance standards and raise expectations of what we are capable of providing to our end clients.” Honourable Lefoko Moagi, Minister of Minerals and Energy, Government of Botswana, added: “The introduction of this advanced provenance technology is extremely exciting and we are very pleased as a large diamond producing country, and shareholder in De Beers, to be a part of this development. Confidence in diamond origin is extremely important and we look forward to seeing the roll out of this new programme delivering new benefits to the diamond industry and giving more assurance to consumers.”