Clarity First: clearing prices for the wholesale polished diamond market
An investigation into the $25 to $30 billion wholesale polished diamond market, the weekly opinion list it still prices off, and the clearing price product that replaces opinion with transaction reality.
The global wholesale polished diamond market turns over an estimated $25 to $30 billion every year. Every transaction inside it is priced against a weekly benchmark published by a single private company, based on its own opinion of what diamonds should be worth. Not what they actually clear for.
That benchmark is the Rapaport Price List. It has been published every Thursday since 1978. It is referenced by jewelers, pawnbrokers, estate buyers, and wholesale dealers in dozens of countries. And the spread between what it says diamonds are worth and what diamonds actually trade for has widened to a point that the market can no longer ignore.
Clarity First is our investigation into that gap.
The market
The wider diamond market was valued at approximately $104 billion in 2024. Our focus is the wholesale polished corridor, the B2B layer where independent jewelers, pawnbrokers, estate buyers, and wholesale dealers transact, estimated at $25 to $30 billion annually. The corridor is standardised in a way that marine, wine, and bloodstock are not. Every polished diamond is described using the same classification system. That standardisation is the foundation of the data model and the primary reason the market is winnable.
The structural flaw is well documented and now quantified. In 2024 the RapNet Diamond Index, which tracks live wholesale asking prices across a multi billion dollar inventory, fell 23% for 1 carat diamonds. The Rap List only fell 13%. That is a 10 point divergence between the official weekly benchmark and the prices the market was actually trading at. Every dealer in the corridor has known the Rap List runs slow. Last year the gap became impossible to defend.
Between what the benchmark says a diamond is worth and what it actually clears for, capital is quietly misallocated. Every single day.
The lived reality
These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are Tuesday morning for the people we are building for.
The independent jeweler. A customer walks in with her grandmother's engagement ring. 1.2 carat round, G colour, VS2, GIA certified. She wants to sell. You check the Rap List. It says $5,800 per carat. But you know the Rap List is not what stones actually clear for. You call a contact in Hatton Garden. He says, try 40% off Rap. You offer £4,200. She takes it to the shop down the road and accepts £5,100 there. You have no idea if you were too low or they were too high. You never find out, because there is no reference that tells you what that stone actually cleared for last week in your market.
The pawnbroker. A man comes in at 3pm with a loose 0.8 carat princess cut, I colour, SI1. No certificate. He needs £600 today. You look at it under the loupe, you check Rap, you offer £550. He takes it. Three weeks later it sits in your case. A trade buyer offers you £480. You have just lost £70 on a stone you spent thirty seconds evaluating with no reference other than a benchmark that does not reflect what anyone is actually paying. This happens multiple times a day, every day.
The estate buyer. You are buying a collection from a probate solicitor. Twenty three pieces, eleven of them with diamonds. You have forty five minutes on site. You need to make an offer on the whole lot. You apply Rap List percentages from memory, adjust for condition, guess at the uncertified stones, and submit a number. You find out six months later that two stones were worth three times what you paid and you overpaid for four others. On average you were roughly right. Roughly right is not a business model.
The seven variable model
Standard diamond valuation tools use four variables. Carat, cut, colour, clarity. The four Cs. Two stones with identical GIA reports on those four variables can trade at a 15% to 30% price spread in the wholesale market. Three additional variables explain most of that unexplained spread, and Clarity First puts all seven on the same input form.
Certifying lab. GIA, IGI, EGL, HRD, AGS, or uncertified. Lab entity variance alone drives a 15% to 25% price difference on identical paper grades, because the market knows the labs grade with very different stringency.
Fluorescence. None, faint, medium, strong, or very strong. Strong blue fluorescence discounts colourless D to F stones by 10% to 15%, but can command a premium on I to M stones. The benchmark ignores it. The trade does not.
BGM status. Brown, green, milky. Stones with subtle undertones or internal cloudiness are discounted heavily in the trade even when the clarity grade is technically high. The benchmark ignores this too. The trade prices it explicitly.
The seven variable form takes a professional user under ninety seconds to complete, uses standard industry shorthand throughout, and signals deep market expertise from the first dropdown. The output is a single condition adjusted clearing price with a confidence band. Not a matrix of asking prices. A clearing price.
The legal context
In May 2025 Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York dismissed Rapaport v. Nivoda with prejudice. The court held that price lists are not copyrightable, because the only way to express the price of a particular diamond is with the specific number corresponding to that price. The merger doctrine applies. Rapaport has appealed to the Second Circuit, and we are monitoring the appeal.
The ruling materially reduces the primary legal risk in this market. Referencing Rap List prices, operating in relation to the benchmark, or building a product that helps users understand their position relative to it is not copyright infringement as a matter of current law. We build Clarity First as an independent clearing price product that operates alongside the Rap List and exposes the spread between it and transaction reality. We do not display the Rapaport pricing matrix. We never have. We never will.
The data
The product is built on four layers of data, each one independently sourced and each one progressively closer to a true wholesale clearing price.
Layer one, baseline asking. The IDEX Online API. Real time wholesale asking prices across the seven variables drawn from a $4 billion live B2B inventory. Independent of Rapaport, licensed, and explicitly designed for third party integration.
Layer two, macro clearing signal. The RAPI divergence from the Rap List. Tracking the spread by carat category, colour, and clarity gives a leading indicator of true wholesale clearing levels and is built entirely from publicly available data.
Layer three, top market calibration. Realised prices from Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams, and Phillips. Genuine clearing prices from competitive bidding for certified, high value stones.
Layer four, dealer attestation. After a user completes a valuation and closes a transaction, they are offered additional valuations in exchange for uploading a redacted memo or invoice. OCR extracts the stone specifications and the transaction price, and automatically redacts seller identity. Data points enter a trimmed mean filter at the category level, dropping outliers more than two standard deviations from the mean. This is the proprietary moat that improves accuracy month after month.
The competitive landscape
Rapaport is the incumbent. Opinion based, slow to adapt, structurally motivated to maintain opacity, and now operating under a federal court ruling that cuts against its primary legal defence.
IDEX Online publishes an independent diamond pricing index built from real time wholesale asking prices across a $4 billion live inventory. Updated hourly, with a pricing API available. It is the cleanest external asking price source in the market, and it has no transaction price product or clearing intelligence of its own.
Nivoda is a B2B diamond marketplace serving roughly 7,500 jewelers globally, and it won the legal battle that produced the May 2025 ruling. It holds completed transaction data from purchases on its own platform.
No incumbent currently sells wholesale diamond clearing prices to independent jewelers, pawnbrokers, and estate buyers. The Rap List tells you what diamonds should be worth. Nobody tells you what they actually cleared for last week. That is Clarity First.
What we are doing
Clarity First is now live as a validation portal. Over the coming months we will go directly into this market, speaking to independent jewelers, pawnbroker chain buying teams, estate buyers, and pre owned dealers in the UK and the US. We are listening first.
If you work in the wholesale polished diamond market as a jeweler, a pawnbroker, an estate buyer, a dealer, or an insurer, we would like to hear from you. The aim is not a sales call. We want to understand what reliable, condition adjusted clearing prices would actually be worth to the people who need them most.
The contact page is open. The Clarity First site is live at clarity-first.co.
The Rap List tells you what a diamond should be worth, according to a committee that has published its opinion every week since 1978. Clarity First tells you what it actually cleared for, in your market, last week. Those are different numbers. The difference is the business.