Jewelry Industry Explores Blockchain Supply Chain
Blockchain technology is gaining a foothold in numerous industries in the past couple of years with the continuous Bitcoin conferences and online activities that aim to increase awareness worldwide, as well as significant upgrades that make the technology more stable and apt for global adoption. One of the most recent episodes of CoinGeek Conversations shows that the jewelry industry that moves gold, diamonds, and other precious metals and gems is also working on developing its own blockchain supply chain.
In the episode, host Charles Miller speaks with co-founder and CEO of London-based online jewelry platform MarketOrders Sukhi Jutla who is exploring her blockchain options, and founder and CEO of the Norway-based enterprise blockchain platform UNISOT Stephan Nilsson who has already successfully implemented a blockchain-based application that has greatly improved the seafood supply chain.
Jutla shares how the jewelry industry has to go through many processes and middlemen in moving high-value products incurring delays and high expenditures in transaction fees and how the system lacks the transparency that a blockchain-based supply chain can provide.
“So, the products that are being moved across in my industry have many, many third parties and middlemen. And so, there’s a lot of processing that’s happening. But I don’t feel that there’s always that level of transparency. And I myself have had instances where I have ordered products from an international country such as Hong Kong or Singapore, but when it reached the destination, such as the UK, the products had actually been opened and some items have been swapped out for lower quality products…. And who was to blame for this? It’s because the supply chain process wasn’t as transparent as could be,” Jutla said.
The jewelry industry can cut down on costs because blockchain technology offers low-cost micropayments, which can also be used as a source of valuable information for business growth like how the seafood industry has benefitted from UNISOT’s incentivized blockchain-based supply chain.
“We see micropayments as a key function in this whole supply chain and tracking system… To incentivize all the actors in the supply chain, we now enable everybody to both buy and sell information. So that could mean that the company that is breeding the fish for a long time, can now start selling information about that fish… they can also sell small pieces of information to a producer that’s gonna make some product out of that or promote it to their customers,” Nilsson explained.
Nilsson goes on to advise Jutla to continue her research online so she can wisely choose which blockchain to use as it is crucial to building her platform on a blockchain that can support all her company’s needs, as well as withstand the test of time—a highly scalable network that can accommodate a high volume of transactions and a stable protocol that does not need to be changed all the time.
“I have to recommend the “Theory of Bitcoin,” Ryan X. Charles and Craig Steven Wright [on YouTube] where they actually talk about every detail about how it’s not a cryptographic system, it’s not a technical system, it’s all an economic system. We’re just taking cryptographic, we take network, we take data and science, we put it together in an economic incentivized system. And that is super important to have a protocol that is economically incentivized, which means that this protocol will continue living forever,” Nilsson said.
