- Diamonds have been turned into NFTs by Icecap, a company headed by Jacques Voorhees
- Icecap will make diamonds non-fungible for the first time, allowing a secondary market to develop
- Jacques Voorhees is the father of Shapeshift founder Erik Voorhees, who is advising on the project
Diamonds have found their way onto the blockchain thanks to Jacques Voorhees, father of Shapeshift founder Eric Voorhees, who has turned the jewels into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through his company, Icecap. Tokenizing diamonds is not a new venture, but Voorhees claims that his venture has more chance of succeeding due to Icecap treating diamonds in a different way compared to other efforts to create fungibility with a non-fungible asset.
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best NFT
Voorhees senior told Cointelegraph that he first got the idea for tokenizing diamonds after discussing NFTs with Erik. After researching the concept, and the tokenization of diamonds in particular, he says he realised that the reason all other efforts have failed was because of how they were treated:
All the efforts to try to create fungibility with a non-fungible item, have ended up failing. And even though they’ve thrown blockchain technology at it, they still have yet to meet with success. I’ve seen this going back all the way to 1972 when the West Coast Commodities Exchange tried to create fungibility and diamond futures contracts. The thing lasted about three days and the market fell out because the contracts weren’t actually similar.
Voorhees says that Icecap, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, will take a different approach which will allow them to create the secondary market that the diamond industry does not currently have, allowing retail investors to sell their tokenized diamonds for the first time on the OpenSea marketplace. Vorhees says that this secondary market represents a potential business opportunity to the tune of $10 billion.
Luxury NFTs Growing in Popularity
NFTs are a steadily growing division of the digital asset class, with everything from property to artworks already tokenized and put onto the blockchain. Gold is perhaps the most popular luxury commodity tokenized so far, but if Voorhees can make a success of tokenizing diamonds with Icecap then we may see more and more luxury items tokenized in the same way in the coming years.
