CIBJO President Gaetano Cavalieri has expressed strong support for De Beers development of a new blockchain driven platform, announced by De Beers’ CEO Bruce Cleaver on December 4.
“This has the potential of being a game changer, with new technologies offering solutions to a challenge that has been notoriously difficult to achieve to date”, Cavalieri is quoted as saying on Rough & Polished, “While we still are waiting for more information from De Beers about how specifically the system can be applied to diamonds, we are well aware of blockchain’s capacity to record for perpetuity chains of transactions, allowing goods to be traced back to their source”.
According to a statement released by Cleaver, the new platform “will provide a single, immutable record that traces a diamond’s individual journey through the value chain”. It will be developed in consultancy with global industry leaders, and will allow “for a highly secure digital register that creates a tamper-proof and permanent record of interactions”. The platform will create benefits for both buyers and sellers, according to Cleaver, since “participants can be confident that a transaction occurred, but safe in the knowledge that the sensitive data remains between them and their counterparty”.
