China’s largest retailer JD.com Inc. and distributed ledger blockchain solutions company Everledger Ltd. today announced an inter-chain collaboration that will combine forces with the Gemological Institute of America to certify diamond authenticity and provide track and trace for online diamond purchases.

The Everledger platform will synchronize GIA’s diamond grading information to JD’s Blockchain Anti-counterfeiting and Tracing Platform and provide customers with independently verified diamond certificates and origin information through the JD.com app.

GIA is a world leader for determining the quality of diamonds based on its universally accepted 4Cs diamond grading criteria. With this collaboration, customers of JD.com will be able to verify the validity of a GIA diamond grade report and view characteristics and provenance for any given diamond purchased.

This information will be stored in a blockchain, which uses distributed ledger technology and cryptography to provide a tamperproof transaction history. Using the blockchain, customers can be assured that information provided by GIA and tracked by JD.com can be trusted not to have been changed after it was added.

“Given the growth in e-commerce, fraud is a very real risk in the diamond market, which is why it’s so important that consumers have access to secure and trustworthy information,” said Chris Taylor, Everledger’s chief operating officer. “By bringing cutting edge blockchain technology, online luxury shopping, and GIA’s gold standard grading expertise together on JD.com, we’re empowering consumers to purchase luxury items with increased confidence.”

The platform’s primary purpose is to provide trust to grading reports and provenance to diamonds sold online, as such it will also be used to help prevent grading report fraud. Algorithmic analysis of the blockchain will help JD.com identify and reduce the fraudulent use of GIA reports. For example, it will prevent different diamonds from being sold using the same GIA report.

That will be supplemented with customer education initiatives to help end buyers learn how to avoid fraudulent activity. In the Chinese market, it’s particularly important because digitally savvy customers account for more than 68% of diamond sales, compared with 45% worldwide.

“Everything GIA does – our research, education and of course grading millions of diamonds each year in our laboratories around the world – has the singular mission of protecting consumers,” said GIA Chief Operating Officer Pritesh Patel. “The innovative and transformational integration of Everledger’s blockchain expertise and JD.com’s impressive reach and consumer relationships with GIA’s industry-leading diamond expertise and universally accepted grading reports is a major step forward for consumer confidence.”

Everledger has previous experience using track and trace blockchain technology for diamonds. In 2016, the company began an effort to put diamonds on the blockchain in a joint collaboration with IBM Corp. The diamond mining and retail company De Beers also launched its own industrywide blockchain diamond provenance platform in 2018.

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