This content was first published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review no. 12 in 2021. The information provided here is therefore current as of the original publication date.
The year 2021 is set to be the breakthrough year. The old surface laser inscriptions on gemstone belts, which proved to be unsafe, removable, erasable and easy to counterfeit, will likely be retired. New laser markers imprinted inside the crystal lattice, across the atomic structure of the diamond, are now coming onto the scene. After Opsydia, about which we talked in the 11th issue of IGR, it is the turn of the Russian giant ALROSA to announce the introduction of its own proprietary, non-invasive technology, invisible at naked eye and that will not affect the purity grade of diamonds.
The project was carried out by the company in collaboration with scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences, along with the NIGP (Geo-Scientific research Enterprise) and the Yakutniproalmaz Institute. Oleg Kovalchuk, PhD (Tech. Sc.), who supervises the project at the Yakutniproalmaz Institute, explains what it is all about: “A nanomark is applied using a laser pulse of a certain wavelength, intensity and duration. This causes nanoregions to form across the entire crystal, which can only be viewed with a scanner created specifically for reading the marks”.
All in all, we are not very far from what was done by Opsydia. The innovation, however, could consist in how such a scanner will be distributed and made available on a larger scale to partners, who will be able to “read” the code and subsequently access other information. At the moment no other details have been made public about this device and how it will be introduced into the diamond supply chain. It is known that Alrosa is currently seeking patents in the world’s major diamond-trading centres, and has started application processes in the US, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, the UK, Israel, Belgium and India.
In short, Alrosa is aiming straight at the market and has more ambitious intentions than Opsydia, which is a Cambridge university spin out, a service company that is currently looking to find partners to associate with their marking program. The Russian group unabashedly declares its primacy in commercial introduction and targets a vertical integration through an addition of value to its cut stones.
“As the world’s largest vertically integrated diamond-mining company, ALROSA is in a unique position: with access to the full cycle of manufacturing, we have all the necessary information about our polished diamonds and the rough diamonds from which they were cut. The laser nanomark technology we have created allows these guarantees to be extended to the diamonds sold by our partners. By purchasing jewellery with a diamond protected by a nanomark, the buyer can be sure that it was actually made by ALROSA: the three-dimensional code embedded in the diamond is linked to its unique identifier and digital passport on the company’s database, which also includes details of the socio-economic benefits associated with its production”.
ALROSA’s objective is to provide a “passport” identifying its product and ensuring its content in terms of quality, cutting characteristics and origin, tracing it from mine to market. Not unnoticed, then, is the not incidental reference to details of socio-economic benefits. Apparently they are trying to create a system, which does not exist at the moment, to assure the exact and univocal correspondence between specific stones and ethical compliance conditions. Such a marker of the type of ALROSA makes unnecessary the delicate (and costly) role played by a “third party” in the process of ethical traceability, i.e., a credible entity that is external and neutral with respect to the interests of the company.
Many observers focus their attention precisely on this factor: the physical marker exhausts its own task once it ensures unambiguously the matching of the object with the set of additional information. What exactly will this additional information consist of? How will they be conveyed? For the time being, the work will be performed by an in-house database. Obviously, sooner or later, the focus will have to shift to the other track of the accountability path, namely the blockchain which should act as an independent, immutable and non-self-referential digital ledger.
Gem News published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review #12, Summer 2021
