Sarine, Tracr, and the Diamond Tech Pivot

The Olam · Diamonds & the Bourse

From Antwerp's three-century reign to Tel Aviv's mass-employment cutting heyday to Dubai's regulatory triumph, the diamond trade's center has migrated twice in a generation. Sarine Technologies and the De Beers Tracr platform represent something different: not a new trading floor, but the information layer that now sits above all three.

Three cities defined the modern diamond trade. Antwerp ran the world's rough and polished trade for roughly three centuries — the cutting wheels of the Jewish-Belgian dynasties along the Pelikaanstraat moving the supply of the global mining industry through a tightly held credentialing system. Tel Aviv overtook Antwerp's cutting volume in the 1970s, employing tens of thousands of cutters at peak, and built the world's most concentrated bourse compound in Ramat Gan. Dubai overtook both in rough trade volume by the mid-2010s, leveraging the UAE's free zone framework, the Almas Tower trading floor, and a deliberate post-2018 VAT structure to capture the bulk of the world's diamond logistics.

The triangle is now an Israeli tech story. The cutting wheels in Tel Aviv have largely gone quiet. The Antwerp HRD grading lab still operates, but the city's industry petitioned the Belgian government in January 2025 for "decisive" public support. Dubai's rough trade is concentrated in a single tower. And the layer that connects all three — and is increasingly capturing the high-margin value of the trade — is no longer geographic at all. It is technological. It runs on Israeli software.

The Israeli pivot

By 2023, the working Israeli diamond cutting industry numbered under 1,000 cutters, down from above 15,000 at peak. Polished diamond exports in 2024 fell 35.6 percent year-over-year to roughly $1.8 billion. Bank financing for the industry sat at $508 million utilized in 2024 — a historic low, 77 percent below the 2008 peak of $2.24 billion. The mass employment base of the trade in Israel is gone.

What replaced it, in part, was a small but high-value technology layer concentrated in two firms.

Sarine Technologies, founded in 1988 and headquartered in Hod Hasharon, develops planning, scanning, grading, and traceability tools for the diamond cutting and retail trade. Listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE: SRNE) with secondary listing on the Singapore Exchange, Sarine has built a near-monopoly on the technology stack used by Indian, Belgian, Israeli, and Chinese cutters to plan and execute high-precision diamond manufacturing. Its Galaxy inclusion-mapping platform alone has been used on roughly 100 million diamonds globally.

The numbers tell the story. While the cutting workforce contracted by an order of magnitude, the Israeli technology layer captured an outsized share of the global diamond manufacturing process. The trade moved away from Tel Aviv. The information about the trade did not.

Tracr and the blockchain layer

Tracr is the De Beers-led blockchain platform that has emerged, since its 2018 pilot and 2022 commercial launch, as the dominant provenance and traceability standard for the natural diamond trade. Built to track diamonds from mine through cutting and retail, Tracr now registers more than two-thirds of De Beers' rough production by value. By early 2025, more than 3 million individual diamonds had been registered on the platform.

Tracr's strategic significance has shifted dramatically since 2022. The G7 sanctions framework imposed on Russian-origin diamonds in 2024 transformed the trade's regulatory landscape. Any trader importing rough into the G7 must now demonstrate non-Russian provenance. Sarine's scanning technology and Tracr's blockchain certification together provide the architecture that makes this verifiable at scale.

The combination — Sarine's diamond-fingerprinting hardware feeding into Tracr's chain-of-custody platform — has effectively become the global compliance infrastructure for the post-sanctions natural diamond trade. The cutting work happens in Surat. The trading happens in Dubai. The certification, planning, and provenance verification flows back through Israeli software.

The Antwerp–Tel Aviv–Dubai triangle

The geographic triangle still exists. Antwerp retains a meaningful share of the world's rough sorting and grading, particularly through HRD and Kimberley Process certification. The Israel Diamond Exchange continues to operate, focused on large polished stones and the technology layer orbiting Sarine. Dubai has consolidated the bulk rough and increasingly polished trade.

But the bourse architecture that defined the twentieth-century diamond trade is no longer where the highest-margin work happens. The information architecture — Sarine, Tracr, and the certification ecosystem around them — captures a different kind of value: recurring revenue on data, certification, planning, and increasingly the marketplace itself. The high-margin choke point is no longer the cutter or the trader. It is the system that makes both auditable.

Where the capital went

The Israeli diamond technology ecosystem is small in employment terms — Sarine itself employs roughly 300 people — but disproportionate in influence. It sits in adjacency to Israeli optics, computer vision, and AI ecosystems. The diamantaire capital that exited the Israeli cutting trade did not disappear. A portion rotated into the technology layer that replaced the cutting workshops — both directly, through investment in companies like Sarine, and indirectly through family-office allocations into Israeli venture funds, real estate, and adjacent commodities.