IBM Is Planning To Use Blockchain To Track Diamonds

International Business Machines Corp. (also known as IBM) announced its plans to use blockchain in order to bring transparency to the jewelry industry.

The new initiative is called the TrustChain. It adopts blockchain in order to track the supply chain roots of a finished piece of jewelry. The term blockchain here relates to a set of shared databases that can be used for transactions between participants. In the jewelry industry, this technology can be used as a means to track the entire spectrum of diamond manufacturing – from extraction to finished pieces.

The proposed blockchain will be “permissioned” by IBM and only industry participants will be able to write data to the ledger. The initiative’s website states the following:

“By placing the current, physical process on a blockchain, we provide better visibility to the consumer throughout the entire supply chain, to allow exchanges of information amongst participants,”

Blockchain could help the jewelry industry in a lot of ways. First, it could streamline supply chain transparency – making it easier for consumers to distinguish authentic pieces of jewelry from fake ones. According to Jason Kelley who is the general manager of blockchain at IBM, “consumers will be able to determine the supply chain of a piece of jewelry by simply scanning the QR code associated with it.

On top of that, the technology could become useful when analyzing and streamlining the supply chain processes. As Kelley explained in a TechCrunch interview, “If there is a dispute, instead of calling and following back through the process in a more manual way, you can click on a trusted chain, and you’re able to see what happened immediately. That reduces the number of steps in the process, and speeds up what has been a paper-laden and manual effort.”

This is not the first time IBM is considering blockchain to a specific industry.