Making a first-of-a-kind futuristic move, Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky, employees of leading U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase, have revealed how they used Ethereum’s Blockchain to become lawfully wedded. On 3rd April, Rose announced on Twitter that the pair had tied the knot on 14th March in physical and virtual worlds.
The couple got married, exchanging digital NFT rings [non-fungible tokens] using their smartphones on the Blockchain. NFTs, in the likeness of the cryptocurrency, constitute unique codes, and ledgers or Digi wallets store them. It can comprise any digital format object such as art, video games, songs, tweets, GIFs, etc.
Couples used Ethereum’s Blockchain to send each other the digital token ‘Tabaat’ [Hebrew term for ring] as virtual wedding bands from their cryptocurrency wallets, with each of the digital rings stored on Blockchain as a proof of marriage. Kacherginsky is a Coinbase principal security engineer, and the bride Rose is a staff product designer at the company.
“Most people get married in a place of religious worship, on a beach, or in the mountains. Peter and I are not most people. We got married on the Blockchain,” Rose tweeted Friday. “In addition to a traditional Jewish ceremony, we wanted to solidify our vows in a more personal way. Since we both work at Coinbase, Peter Kacherginsky [her husband now] wrote an Ethereum smart contract for our marriage that issued digital artwork as tokens (NFTs) to our cryptocurrency wallets,” she continued.
The bride informed that she and her husband stored the digital animation by artist Carl Johan Hasselrot, symbolic of a ring, inside the unique token, which illustrates two distinct things becoming one, like in marriage. Blockchain explorer saved their ‘rare’ vows on blockchain as they made lifelong commitments to each other. “For us, the images of digital rings hidden inside these NFTs will show up in our cryptocurrency wallets as a constant reminder of the permanent bond they represent,” Rose wrote on Twitter. She revealed that the couple exchanged tokens for the wedding on Blockchain due to its incorruptibility.
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Kacherginsky created the 2,218 line-long smart contracts on March 10. The contract cost 0.25 ETH to create — worth roughly $450 at the time. Tabbat sent three more transactions, one hour after formation of the contract. It costs 0.0048 ETH or $87 — suggesting it costs around $537 to tokenize a marriage contract. By contrast, the average physical wedding in the United States costs roughly $25,000.
This is not the first blockchain-based marriage. The first marriage on blockchain was of David Mondrus and Joyce Bayo. With famed Austrian school economist Jeffrey Tucker presiding over the wedding, the couple engraved their nuptials on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Earlier Similarly, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold the digital version of his first-ever tweet for $2.9 million on Monday. According to Valuables Marketplace, his tweet stating “just setting up my twttr” won a bid from Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi. He donated funds obtained for his tweet sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) to the charity named GiveDirectly. It is a fundraising NGO for the African subcontinent to tackle the COVID-19 impacts.
