A paternity test,
for diamonds.

Notes from a session at the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026, "Identifying Your Diamonds with AI and Nanoparticles," with Dr. Daniel Nyfler of Gubelin Gem Lab and Janak Mistry, founder of DiaDNA, moderated by Richa Goyal Sikri.

Decades of trust in this industry have rested on paperwork and relationships. The question the panel opened with: can science move that trust from provenance that is merely declared to provenance that is actually proven. The two panellists have built almost opposite answers.

DiaDNA reads a rough diamond and a polished diamond the way you would read a parent and child, matching microscopic inclusion patterns and structural features unique to each stone, no tag or marker required. Mistry trained the system on 200,000 diamonds starting in 2021, moving accuracy from around 60% at launch to roughly 90% today.

The problem this solves is older than any traceability debate happening elsewhere at the congress. A rough diamond can pass through seventy or more hands before it becomes a finished polished stone. One factory had run a twelve person human vigilance team for eighteen months without finding a single switch. In the first month after installing a DiaDNA scanner, they found three. A tabletop unit costs between $20,000 and $45,000, and a scan takes about two minutes.

Nyfler's approach started somewhere else entirely, tagging stones with a synthetic DNA-based nanoparticle, invisible and roughly 80 to 100 nanometres across, first developed for emeralds and now adapted into an independent spinoff from Gubelin, Provenance Proof. Around a fifth of high grade Zambian emerald production is now estimated to carry these particles, detectable later by a simple swab test.

Diamonds are a newer application, reaching commercial use only in the last two years through a partnership with Surat manufacturer KGK, applied after cutting rather than at the rough stage. The strongest evidence Nyfler offered: nanoparticles were later recovered and correctly decoded from melee diamonds mounted in a finished European watch, confirming the tag survives the entire journey from stone to retail object.

Worth noting, since it sits in useful contrast to Tracr: when Provenance Proof launched for emeralds in 2017, both De Beers and Alrosa reportedly called within two weeks wanting exclusive rights. Nyfler said no, on the basis that the whole point was for the technology to stay open to the entire industry rather than owned by one player. He was explicit that he sees this as complementary to blockchain and paper trails, not a replacement.

An audience member asked the sharpest question of the session: could these nanoparticles eventually be used to secretly enhance a stone's colour, becoming an undisclosed treatment rather than a neutral identifier. Nyfler treated it as a genuinely open concern rather than brushing it off, pointing to feasibility studies showing negligible visible effect at current concentrations, while acknowledging the underlying question, whether applying nanoparticles counts as a coating or treatment, is one the industry has not fully settled.

This was the quietest, least glamorous panel of the congress, and possibly the most consequential. Storytelling and blockchain get the attention, but ordinary theft inside cutting factories has apparently been costing this industry money invisibly for decades, with almost no public conversation about it.