Blockchain technology to power De Beers’ diamond production
Global diamond mining firm De Beers has launched a proprietary blockchain-powered platform to manage its diamond production and distribution.
The firm has long been at work on a blockchain system to trace, record and manage its diamond mining, production and distribution across the globe. The Tracr platform was first piloted and tested back in 2018, and the company has finally released the platform at scale to serve the wider diamond mining industry.
De Beers has already incorporated the system into its global operations and estimates that 25 percent of its diamond production by value is registered on Tracr for 2022’s first three Sights. In the diamond industry, a Sight is a collective term for a sale event and a respective lot of diamonds for purchase.
The platform will give diamond industry producers and retailers access to tamper-proof records of a diamond’s provenance. Sightholders, companies that are authorized bulk purchasers of rough diamonds, will benefit from the immutable record of diamond credentials which will, in turn, provide retailers with the added assurance of a diamond’s pedigree and origin.
De Beers has touted the performance of the platform to be able to scale to meet periods of high production. Tracr will be able to register one million diamonds per week on the platform, which is a major upgrade to centralized platforms that have been criticized for struggling with large volumes of data that historically cause bottlenecks in this process.
As with many blockchain-powered systems, Tracr will allow companies and users to control the permission, use and access to diamond data. This goes down to an individual level, with each user given their own distributed version of the platform, much like a traditional
Read more on cointelegraph.com
