GIA's stake in trust.
Thirty percent, and counting.

Notes from a fireside chat at the World Diamond Congress, Singapore, July 2026, between journalist and author Richa Goyal Sikri and Pritesh Patel, roughly a year into his role as GIA's seventh President and CEO in the organisation's ninety-five year history.

Patel confirmed GIA's investment in Tracr sits at around 30%, though he hedged slightly on the exact figure himself. More useful than the number was how he framed the reasoning. He was explicit that the investment was not really about owning a stake in a traceability platform. It was about consumer confidence as the outcome, with traceability as the mechanism to get there.

GIA's role, in his framing, is governance rather than commerce: bringing independence and trust to a platform so more of the industry feels able to buy in. He described it as building toward broader industry ownership over the coming years, more diamonds onto the platform, more players taking a stake, not GIA running the system alone. That is a meaningfully different story from where Tracr stood at launch, when it was a De Beers-built system much of the trade treated with understandable suspicion given who built it.

Patel named three structural shifts he sees reshaping the industry: trust, the accelerating impact of technology and artificial intelligence, and transforming global markets. The third came with a data point worth keeping. The wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 90% of earners in the United States has widened from roughly 20% a couple of decades ago to around 32% today, and he was clear this is not a US-only story, citing the same pattern surfacing in China and India.

He connected this directly to a point made earlier in the same congress, where the natural diamond market's split between a strong high end and a squeezed middle was described as a K-shaped divergence. Hearing GIA's own leadership treat that framing as settled, not speculative, is useful confirmation that the industry now sees a genuinely two-tier natural diamond consumer, not a single market moving in one direction.

Patel also described GIA's own expanding footprint, new schools in Melbourne and London, an expanding New York campus, and field gemology teams sent to newly significant source regions, Ethiopia's emerging deposits among them, with findings folded into both the research archive and the curriculum on an ongoing basis. GIA's published research, the foundation behind most gemological literature for decades, remains freely accessible without a login.

The Tracr story keeps moving in the same direction it started in: from a De Beers-built system toward something closer to industry-owned infrastructure, with GIA positioning itself as the trust broker in the middle. It is a story we have written about before and will keep updating as the ownership picture changes.