 I'll ask it just the why diamonds question, why the high class assets? Everledger started in 2015 and we believe that there is not a platform provenance in the world. We've seen applications come into the marketplace for procurement systems but there is no platform provenance. And then when you imagine what a provenance platform would entail, we have to go deep within understanding the material science of an object. We've seen a lot of activity in the space with provenance now, from tracking fish to I think avocados and pigs I think is one, but diamonds have some underlying constructs that are really important. Firstly, every diamond is unique in the world and to be able to capture the uniqueness of that diamond in a digital twin was able to be done, not purely from a blockchain perspective but a combination of other technologies. So we take high definition photography, we can enable the identity of that through stress mapping, we can also use resonant ultrasound, there's a whole bunch of other science that has to be combined to take that digital identity into the blockchain. And we're not talking about just putting a label on it, unlike some other things for example a motor vehicle would have an RFID tag or a serial number. So that's one reason why. The second reason is the value construct around diamonds of course has enough yielded margin and enough yielded value to offset the requirements of the development of a platform. So there's a value construct there that actually made a lot more sense. The ability to track a diamond that might start at a rough of $10 million in a wholeness of stone through to a diamond in the marketplace where that's still in the thousands or tens of thousands is a very different economic proposition to tracking a tomato that might be worth less than a cent. Who is still buying diamonds? Because I've heard some media reports, you know, like millennials don't want to buy diamonds for engagement rings anymore, things like that. So who's the diamond market still aimed at really? Well I think it's aimed at the same, you know, the same set of people that it's been aimed at, you know, generations ago. There are certainly life events that want to be celebrated, whether it's a marriage, whether it's the birth of a child, you know, these events are still happening. People are still being getting married and people are still having babies. And so that's certainly one part of the consumer market. Millennials are asking themselves a lot of different questions, you know, they are involved heavily in conversational commerce. So they're making certain aspirational choices. They're really looking now around sustainability and where do items come from? That's the reason why Everledger is providing the service that it provides to the market. Certainly we are seeing synthetic stones, you know, being manufactured. And of course there are other life events that might not be as memorable as a one-time marriage or a birth of a child. But there's still celebrations that are happening in the space of a new job. You know, a career choice, a PhD that's being celebrated. And we see that potentially some of those lesser but just as equivalent celebration topics that people could choose fashion-type jewellery and that's really where synthetic stones sit. So I don't think it's all or nothing. The light switch isn't going to be just turned on or turned off on one day. We still have healthy growth within the industry. You know, whilst natural mining of stones is retracting back, certainly we still see that diamonds and luxury jewellery. I mean, I'm just looking at you. You have probably 15 pieces of jewellery on you today. And I would guess that every woman that walks in the door has some form of luxury piece that's important to them that would have a natural stone in it. That's true, yeah. These are all from my grandparents. There you go. Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. No, it's true. I guess my next question has to do with your work in part of the Hyperledger community and working with IBM. So how is Everledger part of that? How do you guys all work together? So Hyperledger, in the first instance, open source and we make contributions into that community. It's a very important construct. The relationship that we hold with IBM at an enterprise partnership level serves two roles for us. The first role is clearly from a secured cloud deployment environment with their HSBN, I think they called it in the first instance. I don't know what they call it now, actually, blockchain cloud or something. And so that's one part, you know, the opportunity for our customers, the big names within the industry to choose whether they wanted to host it within an IBM infrastructure or an AWS infrastructure sits well within the core constructs of what we do. And the second part is we work very deeply with the R&D team and I'm appointed as a board advisor for the blockchain advisory group for IBM. So helping to lead and understand from a perspective of fabric where that needs to grow, where the engineering could be placed to suit certain market applications. But from a perspective of service offering, you know, we service the industry directly because we've all come from industry. We know and understand the diamond industry and the jewelry industry intimately well from a technology standpoint. So what industry did you come from before you were working for Everledger? I'm a software engineer. So I've spent 25 years working in and around software. And in fact, in the mid 90s, I worked in RFID, which is radio frequency identification. So at the silicon chip and inlay level. So I understand the constructs of that technology and did a fair bit of work on skater devices, which is remote connections on machines. I've had a couple of companies and been OK. I've never had to ask dad for money. So I've sold them at the right price. But, you know, for me, I invested some money in a jewelry business. And that gave me some intimate learning of of industry, generally, more than just the experience of a consumer to buy a diamond. So it's the combination of all of that together. And I think I'm old enough to be your mum. So when you have world experience, you get to understand that when technologies come together like this, it's not necessarily just about the technology and how cool it is. It's about addressing a particular type of set of challenges within industry. And that's exactly what we probably did different very early in the stage than maybe a couple of others in the industry. So we knew exactly what problems were to be solved, the challenges and the economic pain points and then the economic benefit to applying it. And then the rest is sort of history. You know, you see where we are now in the market, we have seven locations. We service the larger names within industry and we've extended well beyond diamond. So Colour Gemstones, Enrilds, Ruby, Sapphires, Tans and I. It's important to us. We look deeply at wine and wine authentication. So how can we apply, you know, all of the geniuses that we've built in terms of our engines with machine vision? How can we apply it in wine? And, you know, last week we were awarded 2018 Tech Pioneer for the World Economic Forum, particularly around the work that we're doing in sustainability. So not just about tip the grower for the coffee that we've drunk, but, you know, more deep constructs on how do we enable actual artisanal, small-scale mining communities? How can we enable that so that marketplaces can be built with fair pricing? And that's really the big work that you'll start seeing, start seeing coming out of Everledger in the next sort of 12 months to two years. I was going to ask, are there any new asset classes you wanted to add? I mean, the wine I hadn't heard, that's interesting. How did you guys come up with that? How do you track the wine? So, I mean, we were first tapped on the shoulder with a wine expert. Her name is Maureen Downey. She's the Sherlock Holmes of wine, heavily involved in the US with the FBI, and which, you know, parts of the investigation led to the the conviction of Rudy Cornier wine, which was about a $200 million fraud. You know, there's certain types of knowledge when you're a wine expert like Maureen is that you can gain from just being within industry for 30 years. So most of these experts within industry have sat within industry for 30 or 40 years. But the reality is there's no underlying system or construct to capture, you know, each of those methodologies or systems or or insight. And that's a part of the work that we've been doing from a technical standpoint. So we were just asked to have a look at it and we said, sure, that makes sense. But for us, we're really interested in physical assets. How can we digitise those at a material science level and some objects won't be able to easily or affordably? And then we're interested in rising asset classes. So I guess when you look at our portfolio, diamonds, jewelry, watches, wine, collected automotive cars, maybe even helicopters, I guess it's motivated by me. The things I like to eat, to drink, to fly, to wear, handbags, you know, selfishly, why not be motivated by that? For us, I think it's around a rising asset class. It's items that we also believe that might want to have fractional ownership. We're interested in futures. So diamonds, you know, there is no financial products on diamonds at the moment. There's no ETFs yet, no futures market. But you could imagine that that would be the next sensible step for the industry to walk towards. So but it can't enable that unless there's pricing and transparency. And so, you know, when you think about the positioning that we hold today, we could become just an important one part of an ingredient towards that new economic modeling for diamonds. And speaking of fractional ownership, I read a few weeks ago that an Andy Warhol painting in the UK was sold on the blockchain for fractional ownership, so people actually own parts of the painting now. What do you think about that? Does that make any sense? Do you think anyone wants to own, you know, like this pixel of a painting? If you can think of it like that. I don't think that they would explicitly own the pixel of a painting. So it's like saying I have a fractional ownership of a property. It's unlikely that the positioning of that ownership would unless it's under a strata title environment, that it would own this window or this door within the house. So I don't think that that is the construct that was being built out. We've certainly seen fractional ownership with diamonds. You know, one of our very first customers was the Singapore Diamond Investment Exchange, which has looked at how do we take diamonds, put them in a fungible sort of form? And then how can we enable the ownership of those? So three carats could be made up of three stones or you could have a three carat diamond being owned by three different people. And I think this type of fractional ownership is likely to occur across many different asset classes. The trick is going to be how can you ensure that the economic value of that investment is yielded correctly out over time? And that's that's difficult to know how you price a market. How do you provide for indexing around around those around those types of asset classes because they haven't been seen as a traditional asset class with fractional ownership? So until we get the construct where banks, insurers recognize that these are potential or asset managers can start to recognize these as investable vehicles, then I think it's likely to be potentially too early in the stage, you know, to have far reach. If you could explain simply to our viewers how you track a diamond from the mine to the store on the blockchain. So diamonds, you know, to understand the process is actually a highly complicated supply chain, but it's also relatively consolidated geographically and within each parts of the process. So diamonds are mined within a number of countries in the world. And those countries probably end up on on, you know, two hands and they're sort of 10 to 12 major mining companies globally. Diamonds will be extracted out of the ground. It will go through a certain set of washing, bay processes and sorting. And there is machinery that actually exists inside of mines. And so you can capture, you know, the the diamonds in parcels. Those diamonds already they're a part of the Kimberley process are already packed within tamper proof containers. And so those tamper proof containers are recorded under batch and the stones are recorded within those within those parcels. The diamonds as they cross borders are then attracted with a certificate called a Kimberley certificate, which is also recorded as a part of the chain as well as the invoice. So the commercial construct of the of the pricing and then diamonds will end up in a place called Surat where they're cut and polished. And those parcels are then opened under camera. And so the parcel and the under camera opening is then matched back to source. Again, with the matching of the appropriate trade documents. Then a diamond will actually go through to the next stage, which is where it's cut and polished. And typically they're actually polished with inside of one control mechanism in a factory that also have connected devices. So we're a quiet IoT enablement company where we connect not only the opinion of experts, but actual machines across the network. And these machines scan. They use a whole bunch of different technologies, whether it be high definitions, spectrography, resonant ultrasound, light refraction. There's a number of different methods and each of those methods are captured. So think of it like how I would be able to know you as an identity. I know your name today. I know your height, your weight. With the photograph, I now know facial recognition about you. But I don't know medically how you are made up. So you would need to have a blood test for me to know your DNA. I take a piece of your hair and I test that as well. Maybe your teeth records also give me some indication. So it's all this forensic layer that we get involved with. And the forensic layer is already captured within the industry, within laboratories, particularly if they're certified diamonds. So we have capture points there. We underpin part of the work in digital certification with the GIA, the Gemological Institute of America, to understand where this sits. They grade 80 percent of the entire world's diamonds are graded by them in their laboratories around the world. And so that's another very large toasted capture point. And then diamonds will eventually out into the retail network. And then the retailers will again check the diamonds through machines that are connected and then sold to a consumer. And so the entire story is captured and told then to the consumer. So there's really no room for fraud in everything you just told me. There's always room for fraud. Of course there is. Well, I mean, you can see diamonds literally go off stream. So not all diamonds are going to be captured on a blockchain. There will be some diamonds that might start on the blockchain and then all of a sudden they do not eventuate into the retail network, so their history will not be persuasive. I mean, you think about we've seen this type of registry already enabled anyway in the capturing of information around second hand cars. So if I go to sell my second hand car and I don't have a, you know, a Kelly Blue Book record in the U.S. or a Carfax or in Australia, there's another name for it. Then ultimately the value of that second hand car is then in question, right? The provenance is not there. So we'll see the same thing happen in other types of assets. So there's always ways to defraud systems and there's always ways to subvert certain constructs. But there's a value reason why people would be deterred away from doing that. There's always going to be black markets and there's always going to be fraud and there's always going to be crime and there's always going to be anti-money laundering. It's up to the government's controls to help to reduce that, not eliminate it. What do you think about Bitcoin? Do you invest in Bitcoin? Do you think that it's something that's also going to be used in the future, like blockchains becoming more prevalent now? I mean, I was fortunate enough in 2010 to buy Bitcoin. And so that was, believe me, it wasn't an educated decision. It was just one that kind of felt like a de-risk at the time. So why not buy some? And so, yes, I mean, I certainly believe that in a cryptocurrency sense that, you know, Bitcoin, of course, is the grandfather of the industry and has been there since day one at its inception. I think that it has survival and longevity beyond just today's, you know, current competition that maybe is seen between Ethereum and Bitcoin. Where the entire future goes for that is not really for me to say. We don't, you know, we do not see ourselves as a crypto company. And to be honest with you, we don't even see ourselves as a blockchain company. You know, we're building a platform of provenance to help with help with transparency in conflict and opaque markets. And we want to build an ethical trade platform. So whether we start to see diamondback crypto currencies come into the space, which is I think we have seen a few, at the end of the day, we still need to have a good anchor between the crypto and the real world. And that's where we sit and we will probably forever sit. Coin Telegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.