Richemont (Cartier) Swiss Luxury Goods To Use Blockchain For Diamond Tracking

Swiss Luxury Goods Giants Richemont To Track Diamonds With Blockchain

Richemont, the owner of some of the planet’s largest manufacturers of luxury goods has announced its intentions to implement blockchain technology. Their objective is to utilize this innovation to help customers ensure the authenticity of their products and the materials used to make them.

Jin Keyu, a recently appointed board member at Richemont, speaking at a ceremony on Thursday said that the Swiss giant was planning to use blockchain to control all the parallel markets.

“As Cartier's parent company, we [Richemont] have recently decided to start utilizing blockchain to trace the origin of diamonds, rocks, and gold back to the mines or recycling factories. For all the watches we sell, we also hope to (use blockchain) to track their sources to validate their authenticity,” she said.

Keyu who is a renowned economist and an associate professor at the London School of Economics also argued that the blockchain projects were not drawing benefits from the existing academic research in the field but starting everything from the scratch. Jin indicated she also plans research to explore questions in the crypto world from the angle of macroeconomics. That work will potentially include designing a cryptocurrency which can perform three essential functions of a currency: storage of value, stability, and unit of account.

Tracking of objects is becoming one of the major areas in which blockchain promises to solve multiple problems which include theft, fraud or counterfeiting of products. The expansion of blockchain to the luxury goods sphere is a good sign for the technology. Luxury brands are not as conservative as financial institutes, but they are still extremely concerned about their reputation.