Everledger's Leanne Kemp on How to Enable Marketplaces With Fair Pricing

Leanne Kemp is the founder of blockchain platform Everledger, which tracks high-class assets like diamonds in order to reduce fraud and promote more viable marketplaces.

In the interview, Kemp explains how she considers Everledger's role to be an anchor between the crypto space and the "Real world," providing a provenance platform to develop sustainable practices across the diamond industry.

Firstly, every diamond is unique in the world, and to be able to capture the uniqueness of that diamond in a digital twin was able to be done not purely from a blockchain perspective, but a combination of other technologies.

The ability to track a diamond that might start at a rough of 10 million dollars in wholeness of a stone through to a diamond in the marketplace, where that's still in the thousands or tens of thousands- it's a very different economic proposition to tracking it tomorrow.

MJ: Who is the target audience for buying diamonds? Are millennials still buying diamonds?

From a perspective of service offerings, we service the industry directly because we've all come from industry - we know and understand the diamond industry and the jewelry industry intimately well from a technology standpoint.

It's not just about tipping the grower for the coffee that we've drunk, but more deep constructs on how do we enable actual artisanal, small-scale mining communities? How can we enable that so that marketplaces can be built with fair pricing? And that's the big work that you'll start to see start seeing coming out of Everledger in the next 12 months to two years.

MJ: Could you explain how exactly a diamond is tracked from the mine to the store on the blockchain?

The diamonds, as they cross borders, are then attracted with a certificate called a Kimberley certificate, which is also recorded as a part of the chain as well as the invoice for the commercial construct of the pricing.

Then diamonds will eventuate out into the retail network, and then the retailers will again check the diamonds through machines that are connected and then sold to a consumer.