Diamonds are the latest conventional asset to get the cryptocurrency industry’s red-hot tokenization treatment, as the precious stones will now be accessible on blockchain rails for investors.
Crypto securities trading platform Oasis Pro created a token on the Avalanche C-Chain that represents a stake in the Diamond Standard Fund, a product sponsored by Diamond Standard Commodities and Horizon Kinetics, the companies announced in a Wednesday press release.
“For the first time in history, Diamond Standard and Oasis Pro are making an approximately $1.2 trillion natural resource accessible to investors via a more convenient, tradable fund,” said Cormac Kinney, founder and CEO of Diamond Standard.
The new offering arrived as real-world asset (RWA) tokenization – placing traditional assets such as gold, credit and bonds on blockchains in the form of a token – has become more popular over the past year. Global traditional finance giants like Franklin Templeton and HSBC have participated in tokenization-related pilot projects or started offering services. Most recently, BlackRock introduced a tokenized fund backed by U.S. Treasuries and repurchase agreements on the Ethereum blockchain.
The Diamond Standard Fund, which is benchmarked to Bloomberg’s Diamond Standard Index (DIAMINDX), is structured in a way that makes it accessible to pension funds and endowments, while also being eligible for U.S. retirement accounts known as IRAs.
The token adopted the ERC-3643 token standard, an open-source suite of smart contracts that allows the issuance, management and transfer of permissioned tokens tailored for tokenized assets.
“Tokenizing diamonds and offering exposure through a fund structure on Avalanche is a great example of how blockchain can bring transparency and efficiency to an asset class that was previously opaque and inaccessible for institutions,” said John Wu, president of Ava Labs, the ecosystem development organization behind Avalanche.
