Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky, U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase employees, revealed how they used Ethereum’s blockchain to marry legally.
On April 3, Rose posted on Twitter to announce that the pair had married on March 14, both in physical and virtual words.
Most people get married in a religious place of worship, on the beach or in the mountains. Pedro (@_iphelix) and I am NOT the majority of people. We got married in #blockchain. 1/7 pic.twitter.com/2ExexrlLbZ
– Rebecca Rose (@rgoldilox) April 2, 2021
In addition to a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, Kacherginsky wrote an Ethereum smart contract called Tabaat that issued tokenized NFTs “rings” in the form of TBT tokens for couples’ wallets. Tabaat is the Hebrew word for ring.
Kacherginsky created the 2,218 long-line smart contract on March 10, with the contract costing 0.25 ETH to create – worth about $ 450 at the time. An hour after the contract was created, three more transactions were sent from Tabaat for an additional cost of 0.0048 ETH or $ 87 – suggesting that it costs about $ 537 to symbolize a marriage contract.
The ceremony itself consisted of two transactions – the transfer of the contract’s NFT ‘rings’ to Rose and Kacherginsky. In total, the ceremony took 4 minutes to be validated by the Ethereum chain and generated $ 50 in mining fees.
In contrast, the average physical marriage in the United States costs about $ 25,000.
The NFTs represent an animation of two circles merging to become one, and were illustrated by artist Carl Johan Hasselrot. On Twitter, Rose said:
“Blockchain, unlike physical objects, is forever. It is unstoppable, impossible to censor and requires no permission from anyone. Just as love should be. What could be more romantic than that. “
This is not the first blockchain-based wedding, with DLT being used for the first time to tie the knot in October 2014. The wedding saw David Mondrus and Joyce Bayo formalize their wedding by scanning a QR code during a ceremony held during a private conference. Bitcoin at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.