GIA Acquires 30% Stake in De Beers’ Tracr Platform

The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) has agreed to take a 30% shareholding in Tracr, De Beers’ provenance tool, the organizations announced Friday.

The investment is a “significant step” toward Tracr’s independence from De Beers, the miner said on the opening day of the JCK Las Vegas show. It follows the GIA’s 2023 move to include traceability information from the platform on eligible grading reports.

“At De Beers, we have been providing provenance data on diamonds through Tracr for several years, and we believe that delivering provenance should become an industry standard,” De Beers CEO Al Cook commented. “Following our promise to open Tracr up to broad ownership, we are proud to be partnering with GIA as Tracr evolves into an independent, industry-wide platform.”

De Beers launched Tracr in 2018 as a blockchain-backed platform for tracking diamonds from the source. In 2023, it opened the platform up to the wider industry.

More than 5 million rough diamonds have been registered on Tracr at source, equivalent to about two‑thirds of De Beers’ rough-diamond production by value, the company said. Since January 2025, the platform has offered information on single country of origin for De Beers diamonds, with all newly sourced De Beers rough diamonds of 1 carat and above being registered on the platform.

“Our collaboration with Tracr over the past several years reinforced our belief that combining source-based blockchain provenance with GIA’s independent grading and identification expertise can help unlock a new level of transparency for the diamond industry,” said GIA president and CEO Pritesh Patel. “As Tracr continues to scale globally, we see a tremendous opportunity to deliver meaningful, verifiable provenance information from the source to the consumer.”

De Beers also used its annual JCK breakfast event to unveil its new holiday-season campaign, which will apply the Desert diamonds theme to four classic jewelry categories: stud earrings, eternity bands, tennis bracelets and halo pendants. These constitute 70% of diamond-jewelry purchases, De Beers noted.

Launching in September, “Desert diamonds Icons” will bring “newness and individuality” to those four designs, De Beers said.

“While demand has performed well for larger natural diamonds, and this has supported stable retail-sales value for natural-diamond jewelry, it is critical for industry participants to work together on the campaign to drive demand across the natural-diamond category as a whole,” the miner said.

Image: A rough diamond at De Beers’ offices in Calgary, Canada. (Ben Perry/Armoury Films/De Beers)