The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) is joining Tracr, a diamond blockchain platform developed by De Beers, in a bid to further promote consumer confidence in natural diamonds. 

The partnership will see GIA include an immutable record of the provenance of polished diamonds in its diamond grading reports for the first time as the industry continues to progress towards a unified approach for provenance assurance. 

Ryan Perry, acting executive vice president of Strategy & Innovation for De Beers, explained, “As the issue of diamond provenance rapidly grows in importance for stakeholders across the diamond value chain, having immutable data about a diamond’s journey from the source on grading reports is a major step forward and will underpin consumer confidence.”

Consumers purchasing a diamond traced from the source by Tracr and graded by GIA will receive a GIA report with enhanced information on diamond provenance. As De Beers registers more diamonds on Tracr, which are then traced through the value chain, the cooperation between GIA and Tracr represents a step-change in the diamond industry’s ability to provide provenance assurance at scale for consumers.

Tracr has registered more than one million rough diamonds at source and 110,000 diamonds at the manufacturer level securely on their dedicated Tracr instances.