De Beers, a direct competitor of the Alrosa mine in Russia, took advantage of the recent sanctions in its official website statement. “Every diamond discovered by De Beers Group comes from one of our mines in Botswana, Canada, Namibia or South Africa.” Russia is absent from the list, and the innuendo is clear.

Jewelry giant Tiffany & Co. also stated that it discontinued Russian diamond imports. Stones currently in transit as well as those already in US stores will remain outside the scope of the sanctions. 

Despite all assurances of compliance with President Biden’s executive order to ban Alrosa exports to the United States, it was virtually impossible to prove the provenance of a natural gemstone. 

The solution comes from Sarine Technologies. An increasing number of companies in the diamond industry are relying on the publicly traded company for proof of a gemstone’s provenance. Even when a gem crosses borders, Sarine can trace it and identify the point of origin.

The corporation deployed a global fleet of state-of-the-art 3D gemstone scanners throughout the mining and production industry that identify the inherent attributes of each jewel. From mine to jewelry store, every point in the supply-chain rescans the gemstones. When a match is made, the stone is verified.

Eastern European stones are commonly sold in India, and exchange hands before making their way to their international destinations. Blood diamonds are commonly fed into supply chains unbeknownst to purchasers.

The Verify website conducted an interview with RapNet founder, Martin Rapaport, who wrote about loopholes in the US sanctions. “The order places no restrictions on the U.S. importation of polished diamonds sourced from Russian rough diamonds but cut and polished elsewhere.” 

In order to document sourcing, Sarine uses blockchain technology to create an immutable record of a gem’s initial location, its movement, and ownership. When a rough jewel is mined, it is scanned and logged into the online distributed ledger. 

As the product is rescanned at each point of exchange, the software confirms a match and the data is stored in the blockchain. The customer can access an online report that certifies the provenance and journey of the jewelry.

“It’s changing the market,” says Simon Levy, a diamond sales executive in The Israel Diamond Exchange LTD. “Mined gems are meaningful and symbolic, but many of our customers over the last decade are more concerned with where our rough stones come from. Having a scientific means to verify where they originate is important to them, and to me as well.”

The biggest hurdle for the tracing concept was the ability to find distinctive, inimitable characteristics inherent in the stone. Once the technologies were able to make these distinctions, a world of possibilities was opened.

Jonathan Larson, an assistant professor of computer science in Cambridge, MA explained that “Blockchain uses distributed computing, and it’s a brilliant way to securely track and observe digital records. We began experimenting with extending the technology from digital assets to actual things.”

He continued, “We could track them, but we weren’t able to authenticate all of them—we didn’t know if they were the same object. But when there’s a distinct identifier, then you have both authentications matching as well as the history and exchange. The more granular the distinction, the higher the level of authentication.”

Once paired with distributed ledger technology, the software knows everything about the stone, including where it came from and where it ends up. The failsafe system benefits everyone involved in legitimate trade—especially retail customers.

Tiffany and other companies will be embracing high-tech solutions to ensure products are coming from vetted sources. That’s great news for everybody.