Blockchain Startup Everledger Partners with Singapore Diamond Exchange and Kynetix

Everledger, the London-based startup that uses the blockchain to securely store data and provide provenance for high-value physical assets such as diamonds and artwork, has entered into a partnership with the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) and physical commodity markets expert Kynetix.

The Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange (SDiX) is the world’s first commodity exchange in physically settled diamonds. The exchange is also the first fully electronic self-regulated marketplace for traders and accredited investors powered by real-time transaction data. The exchange revealed the new partnership through a press release on June 15.

Kynetix is a leading physical commodity digitization expert that has developed a platform called Sentinel that allows commodity exchanges and trading companies to meet the challenges associated with compliance, automation, risk and revenue generation. Sentinel’s sophisticated post-trade software powers quick processing time for large-scale physical deliveries.

The three companies have successfully concluded the first part of its proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based authentication and record-keeping service for trading diamonds on a global commodity exchange.

Everledger’s blockchain technology will be used to verify the ownership and authenticity of the diamonds, which will be queried through Kynetix’s Sentinel market infrastructure platform. This will enable owners of diamonds with certificates of ownership from third party verification laboratories to ascertain the history and confirm ownership of their asset.

The head of Business Development at Kynetix, Guillaume Kendall said: “In line with our mission to build total trust in physical commodities, we believe this innovative integration of our Sentinel platform with blockchain is yet another step towards reducing the risks associated with trading and financing commodities globally.“

Once a trade happens on SDiX, the changes in the ownership of the diamond will be automatically recorded on the blockchain, which ensures proof of ownership is securely recorded due to the blockchain’s immutable nature. This record is then made easily available to all relevant market participants.

Everledger founder and CEO Leanne Kemp said: “It was a pure technical delight to integrate with Kynetix, a powerful combination of technology and purpose entwined. We are pleased to provide the market-leading blockchain infrastructure that is key to SDiX’s verification, and data archiving services and look forward to working industriously with the market on creating purposeful tooling to enable safe and fast trading in physical diamonds.”

The service was able to verify the details of a consigned diamond basket on SDiX consisting of Gemological Institute of America (GIA) certified stones using the data points that are used by Everledger in its provenance process. The solution was able to output a “view receipt” of the digital certificate for each stone in the basket, housed on the blockchain, proving its efficiency.

The CEO of the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange Linus Koh, said: “This exciting collaboration builds on SDiX’s record of delivering advanced technologies to enable a trusted, fair and transparent marketplace for trading diamonds as an investable asset class. This new concept draws on blockchain’s distributed ledger capability to demonstrate how we can further instill confidence and convenience for the benefit of diamond investors and financiers.”

This new system is expected to be applicable as a solution to a wide range of diamond market challenges such as enhancing provenance data, increasing the security and efficiency of the supply chain, as well as helping to develop new risk management tools.