Traceable: What It Means to Us
Traceability is the ability to answer, with evidence, where a specific parcel of material came from and who handled it before it reached its current owner. In gold and diamonds, that answer has become a commercial necessity: major buyers, refiners and regulators increasingly require it, alongside the ethical case for getting it right.
Where the industry already is
The diamond trade has the longest institutional history here. The Kimberley Process, established in the early 2000s, created a government-backed certification scheme to keep conflict diamonds out of formal markets, though it has been widely criticised for a narrow definition of “conflict” that leaves other abuses unaddressed. More recently, De Beers built Tracr, a blockchain platform that follows individual diamonds from mine to retail, demonstrating what a full digital chain of custody can look like at industrial scale. In gold, the LBMA’s Responsible Gold Guidance and the Responsible Minerals Initiative set the due diligence standards that refiners and downstream buyers are increasingly expected to meet.
What the technology can and cannot prove
Science and technology studies, the academic field that examines how technologies actually function inside social and institutional systems, offers a useful caution here: a ledger is only as honest as the data entered into it. Blockchain guarantees that a record has not been altered after the fact. It says nothing about whether the first entry, the claim that this parcel came from this site, was accurate. That first-mile verification is a human and procedural problem, not a cryptographic one.
This matters especially in ASM, where an estimated 45 million people work directly across some 80 countries (World Bank and Pact’s 2023 State of the ASM Sector report), and where artisanal output is estimated at roughly 15 to 20 percent of global gold production and a similar share of global diamond production. Material from that scale of activity enters the same markets as large-scale production, frequently through several intermediaries before it is recorded anywhere at all.
How this plays out at Orivia
We treat traceability as an operating discipline first and a technology second. Site-level verification, physical inspection, production reconciliation, direct relationships with the people running an operation, is what makes the first entry in any ledger trustworthy. The blockchain layer then preserves and shares what has already been properly verified, for our own operation and for the buyers, traders and investors we advise.