International diamond mining company De Beers reportedly introduced a proprietary blockchain-based platform to assist with the management of its diamond production and distribution.

Specifically, the company has reportedly been putting in extensive efforts on a blockchain solution dedicated to the tracing, recording, and managing of its diamond mining, production, and distribution throughout the world. 

The platform – going by the name “Tracr” – was initially piloted and tested four years ago in 2018, and the firm has finally made the platform officially available at scale to serve the wider diamond mining sector.

De Beers has already completed the incorporation of the solution into its international operations and ran estimations that a quarter of its total diamond production by value is registered on Tracr for 2022’s first three Sights. 

Throughout the diamond sector, a Sight is a collective term for a sale event and a respective lot of diamonds for purchase.

The platform reportedly aims to assist diamond industry producers and retailers in tapping into tamper-proof records of a diamond’s provenance. 

Sightholders – firms that were greenlit to operate as bulk purchasers of rough diamonds – will take advantage of the immutable record of diamond credentials, which will, in turn, equip retailers with the extra assurance regarding a diamond’s pedigree and origin.

De Beers claimed that the platform has the scaling ability to handle periods of high production. Tracr can complete the registration of one million diamonds on a weekly basis on the platform, which is a significant upgrade compared to centralized platforms, which have been suffering from lashbacks for having a hard time handling big volumes of data, that historically cause bottlenecks in this process.

Similar to other blockchain-based solutions, Tracr will enable establishments and users to control the permission, use, and access to diamond data on an individual level, with every user granted their own distributed version of the platform, the same as a traditional node operator in other blockchain networks.