Diamond mining and retail company De Beers announced Tuesday that it intends to launch the first industrywide blockchain to track diamonds.

The distributed-ledger technology would allow De Beers to keep track of diamonds through the entire supply chain from the mine to jewelry store. De Beers is the largest diamond producer in the world by value and has led numerous industry efforts to track and authenticate diamonds.

The primary application is to prove that diamonds do not come from war-torn areas where the sale of the gems could be used to finance violence. These diamonds are also called “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds.”

With a blockchain, the same technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, De Beers can mark and track every transaction that occurs with a particular gemstone. The technology provides a distributed ledger that uses cryptography to secure transaction data and make it extremely difficult to modify that data after the fact.

“It’s a huge public ledger as immutable as anything invented,” De Beers Chief Executive Bruce Cleaver told Reuters. “It’s a much more unhackable system than anything on a single server.”

DeBeers’ isn’t the first application of blockchain to the diamond business. In 2016, London-based Everledger Ltd. built a similar system to register and track diamonds using a blockchain service from IBM Corp.

Over the past few years, blockchains have been sought after by numerous industries for the purpose of tracking products. IBM has also been experimenting with a supply chain blockchain system for tracking food from farm to shelf to improve food safety. Other industries such as shipping, insurance and stock exchanges also have blockchain implementations being tested to reduce fraud and increase security.

A report from Allied Market Research anticipates the still growing market for blockchain technology will reach $5.43 billion by 2023.

Cleaver said the De Beers diamond authenticity blockchain would be open to the entire industry. The objective would be to provide a tracking mechanism across the entire value chain to fight fraud and enhance public satisfaction in the ethical sourcing of diamonds. “It has the ability to be very significant for the industry,” Cleaver said. He added that a blockchain system would add a sense of transparency that could be used to ease the concerns of banks over funding the mining and transport of diamonds.

The blockchain could also be used in the supply chain of other minerals, such as those used in electronics and jewelry. Indeed, there are conflict minerals as well, such as columbite-tantalite, cassiterite, wolframite and gold. Many of these minerals are mined in areas where their sale funds crime and warfare.

Just like diamonds sourced in the same way, laws in countries such as the United States prohibit sourcing from these locations and require companies to audit their supply chains and report their use of potential conflict minerals. Using blockchain technology to automate and secure the tracking and authenticity of diamonds and minerals would make this sort of auditing cheaper and faster.

Cleaver said De Beers began its pilot project into tracking diamonds this month after what he says was months of research. Details on who is participating in the pilot are unknown at this time, but he said it includes De Beers “sightholders,” the term the company uses to describe accredited diamond buyers.

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