The diamond industry has a transparency problem. It has known about it for decades. And for the past eight years it has been attempting to solve it with blockchain technology.
This week, the story moved on significantly. The GIA - the Gemological Institute of America, one of the most respected independent bodies in the diamond world - announced it has acquired a 30% shareholding in Tracr, De Beers' blockchain-based diamond provenance platform. The announcement was made at JCK Las Vegas on 29th May 2026, and it signals that Tracr is moving from a De Beers proprietary tool towards something the industry wants to position as an independent standard.
We think this development is interesting enough to write about properly. Because blockchain diamond tracking raises a question that the industry would rather not answer directly: if you can now trace a mined diamond from the ground to your finger, does that actually make it ethical?
Our honest answer is: not necessarily. And here is why.
What Is Tracr and How Does It Work?
De Beers launched Tracr in 2018, originally as an internal traceability tool. The concept is straightforward enough. Every rough diamond over one carat is registered on the platform and assigned a unique digital identity - capturing its carat weight, colour, clarity, and country of origin. As the diamond moves through the supply chain, each transaction is recorded on the blockchain. The record cannot be altered retrospectively, which is the key feature of blockchain technology.
As of 2026, Tracr has registered over five million rough diamonds at source, representing approximately two thirds of De Beers' rough production by value. The GIA has been including Tracr provenance data on eligible grading reports since 2023, and this week's acquisition of a 30% stake represents a significant step towards Tracr becoming an industry-wide infrastructure rather than a single company's system.
In principle, this is genuinely positive. Knowing where a diamond comes from is better than not knowing. Traceability is a prerequisite for accountability.
But traceability and ethics are not the same thing. And that distinction matters enormously.
The Problem Tracr Cannot Solve
Here is the question De Beers is very careful not to answer in its Tracr publicity: if a diamond comes from a country where human rights abuses are taking place in the mines, does registering it on a blockchain make it acceptable to sell?
The answer is no. But the system does not prevent it.
Tracr tells you where a diamond came from. It does not tell you what conditions the workers in that mine were living under. It does not tell you whether the government receiving the diamond revenues is using them to fund repression. It does not tell you whether the land was taken from communities without consent. It records the journey. It does not audit the ethics of that journey.
Knowing where a diamond was mined is the beginning of the ethical question, not the end of it. Tracr answers 'where'. It cannot answer 'at what cost'.
The Kimberley Process: Still Broken
The background to all of this is the Kimberley Process - the international certification scheme introduced in 2000 to prevent conflict diamonds from entering legitimate supply chains.
The Kimberley Process defines a conflict diamond as one used to finance rebellion against a recognised government. That sounds reasonable until you examine the loopholes carefully.
What the Kimberley Process does not cover includes: diamonds mined under conditions of human rights abuses where there is no rebel group involved, diamonds from mines secretly part-owned by governments through shell companies, tax fraud, money laundering, and diamonds from non-compliant countries smuggled into compliant ones and passed off as certified.
Global Witness - one of the founding members of the Kimberley Process - withdrew from it in 2011, stating that the scheme was fundamentally failing to stem the flow of conflict diamonds. Zimbabwe's Marange diamond fields have been linked to documented killings, torture, and forced labour, yet Zimbabwe remains a Kimberley Process member because the abuses are carried out under government sanction rather than by a rebel group.
The Central African Republic has been linked to diamond smuggling despite being a KP member. The scheme monitors rough diamonds sold in batches, which makes individual stone tracking essentially impossible at that level.
This is the context in which Tracr was developed. De Beers needed something to add credibility to a supply chain that the Kimberley Process alone was manifestly failing to clean up.
The Uncomfortable Question About Tracr
The original version of this blog - written when Tracr was in its early trial phase - made a pointed observation that we think is still worth repeating. The very fact that De Beers felt the need to develop a complex blockchain tracking system at all is an implicit acknowledgement that the existing certification process was not working.
If the Kimberley Process were genuinely effective, there would be no need for an additional layer of provenance technology. The need for Tracr is an admission of the problem. The publicity around Tracr, however, carefully avoids saying so.
There is also a structural concern worth noting. De Beers charges partner organisations to access the Tracr system. For smaller producers or jewellers who cannot afford or choose not to participate, the alternative is that they struggle to do business with De Beers - who remain one of the most significant forces in the mined diamond industry. The system creates dependency as much as it creates transparency.
The GIA's 30% acquisition this week does move Tracr towards genuine independence, which is a meaningful development. Whether it ultimately results in an industry-wide standard that genuinely holds all participants to account - rather than simply providing traceability for willing participants - remains to be seen.
What Blockchain Actually Cannot Do
Blockchain is a remarkable technology for recording transactions in a way that cannot be altered. But it has a fundamental limitation that applies directly to diamonds: it can only record what is put into it.
If a diamond is registered on Tracr with accurate information, the record is reliable. If it is registered with inaccurate information - or if it enters the supply chain before being registered - the blockchain record is only as trustworthy as the person who created it. The technology is sound. The integrity of the data depends entirely on human honesty at the point of entry.
In a supply chain as long and complex as the mined diamond industry - where a stone can pass through a dozen pairs of hands across multiple countries before reaching a jeweller - that is a significant vulnerability.
The Alternative We Actually Believe In
We are not writing this to be cynical about technological innovation. Tracr is a genuine attempt to solve a real problem and it is better than what existed before. The GIA's involvement adds meaningful independent credibility. These are positive developments.
But we think the most honest thing we can say is this: the reason De Beers needs Tracr is the same reason we sell lab grown diamonds. The mined diamond supply chain is too long, too complex, and too opaque to guarantee ethical sourcing through any certification system - however sophisticated.
A lab grown diamond grown in a controlled facility, by a producer we have vetted, using renewable energy, and certified by the GIA or IGI, has a supply chain short enough to actually understand. We do not need blockchain to trace it because we already know the story. It is three steps long, not thirty.
That is not a criticism of Tracr. It is simply a statement of why we believe lab grown is the cleaner answer - not because the technology of tracking has failed, but because the supply chain it is trying to track is inherently difficult to make accountable.
The only truly traceable diamond is one whose supply chain is short enough to understand without a digital passport. That is what a lab grown diamond from a verified renewable energy producer actually is.
What to Watch
The GIA's acquisition of 30% of Tracr is the most significant development in mined diamond traceability in years and it will be interesting to watch how the platform evolves under shared governance. If Tracr genuinely becomes an independent industry standard rather than a De Beers marketing tool, and if participation becomes broadly mandatory rather than commercial and optional, it will represent meaningful progress.
We will keep watching. And we will keep being honest about what it does and does not solve.
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