Richemont, the makers of luxury goods, plans to utilise blockchain in order to bring transparency to its supply chain.
Jin Keyu, a recently appointed board member at Richemont, speaking at a ceremony on Thursday said that the Swiss giant was planning to use blockchain to control all the "parallel markets", a report in Coindesk said.
"As Cartier's parent company, we [Richemont] have recently decided to start utilising blockchain to trace the origin of diamonds, rocks and gold back to the mines or recycling factories. For all the watches we sell, we also hope to (use blockchain) to track their sources to validate their authenticity," she said.
Richemont owns brands like Cartier, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Alfred Dunhill and Montblanc. First three brands sell watches and jewellery, Alfred Dunhill sells men's clothing, watches and leather goods and Montblanc makes writing instruments.
Tracking of objects is becoming one of the major areas in which blockchain promises to solve multiple problems which include theft, fraud or counterfeiting of products.
IBM, in March, announced that it had made a computer tinier than a grain of a salt in size which can be used to track the shipment of a product.
Keyu who is a renowned economist and an associate professor at the London School of Economics also argued that the blockchain projects were not drawing benefits from the existing academic research in the field but starting everything from the scratch.
She also announced her decision to accept the role of advisor at China-based blockchain startup Ultrain and contribute her expertise on macroeconomics.
"To me, blockchain essentially restructured the entire economic spectrum. ... I think it's extremely interesting because, to solve this broad issue, we need not only microeconomic theories ... but also macro ones such as currency, monetary policy and regulation," Keyu said.
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