Indian couple celebrates blockchain wedding with NFT vows and digital priest

Most people might choose to get married on a beach or a five-star resort, but Indian couple Shruti Nair and Anil Narasipuram tied the knot in the the most technologically-advanced way possible.

Hailing from Pune, Nair and Narasipuram got married on November 15, 2021. Because of the rampant spread of Covid-19 in India, the couple decided to have a courthouse wedding, officiated by Anoop Pakki, a 'digital priest'. Their relatives attended the ceremony on Google Meet.

Nair, an alumna of Knauss School of Business inSan Diego, and Narasipuram, an alumnus of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, created an NFT titled 'Ekatvam' (oneness), which Pakki minted on OpenSea, a P2P NFT marketplace, with the money that the couple transferred to him via Metamask.

“The transaction took a few minutes (and about $35 in ETH gas fees) after which we were pronounced husband and wife by our digital priest!” Narasipuram said in a LinkedIn post.

Their NFT vow read:

“We won’t make any big promises, but we will do everything we can to make this work. Through all our disagreement and conflict, we hope to grow our understanding of each other and ourselves."

Using this NFT, they digitally signed an 'Ethereum smart contract', which cemented India's first-ever blockchain wedding.

“The transaction is a permanent, immutable and public record of our commitment to each other on the ETH blockchain,” said Narasipuram.

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The blockchain wedding, an emerging novelty in India, is hardly so elsewhere. Narasipuram and Nair's wedding follows a US couple's wedding in March 2021, where virtual rings (NFTs) were exchanged using smartphones.

"We may be the first couple married on the blockchain in India (as far as I know), but we certainly won't be the last. Cryptocurrency and blockchain represent a significant change in the way we transact and and the way we trust. This is just the beginning," Narasipuram said.

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