Precious Investments Inc. and its subsidiary, BitGem Asset Management Ltd. (BAM), announced last week that the launch of its forthcoming crowdsale of the world’s first diamond backed cryptocurrency, the PinkCoin, will take place on January 18th, 2016, starting at 9 am EST.



The initial crowdsale will comprise of 5,000,000 PinkCoin tokens, with the initial diamond asset pool having been valued at 5,000,000 USD. In future offerings, BAM can issue up to 95,000,000 new PinkCoin tokens in a non-dilutive manner.



“We are extremely excited of this official launch and colored diamonds are the rarest commodity in the world and quite simply the worlds most concentrated form of wealth; it is expected that this trend will continue”, said Dr. Nataliya Hearn, Precious Investments Inc., CEO, in a statement. “Pink and other fancy grade colored diamonds are the only asset class that have consistently increased in value well over 10% per year and they are the only commodity that has not decreased in price since they began being tracked in 1959. This will only enhance the validity of PinkCoins in the market place.”



The press release explains that PinkCoin is an Ethereum based cryptocurrency backed by a pool of fixed colored diamond assets kept in trust by BAM. The diamonds are insured by Lloyds of London and all escrowed diamonds have been independently appraised and certified.



Moreover, the holders of PinkCoin will be able to trade PinkCoins for other assets and asset pool backed tokens on The BitGem Decentralized Marketplace which is expected to be available in the second quarter this year. PinkCoins can be stored and traded with any wallet and exchange provider that supports tokens that allow trading of tokens which follow Ethereum's standardized contract APIs, including the official Ethereum client implementations.