San Francisco: Marriages are made in heaven, but the ring exchange can now even happen in digital tokens or Blockchain on Earth. In a first such incident, two employees at cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase have exchanged NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as virtual rings using smartphones during their wedding ceremony, IANS reported.
NFTs allow people to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the Blockchain. NFT stands for "non-fungible token," and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, tweets, animated GIFs, songs or even video games.
Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky, during their traditional Jewish ceremony in the US last month, sent each other digital tokens as "virtual rings". The name of the token is "Tabaat", the Hebrew word for ring.
"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 said in a tweet on 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 @_iphelix wrote an @Ethereum smart contract for our marriage that issued digital artwork as tokens (#NFTs) to our cryptocurrency wallets," she posted.
As part of the ceremony, the couple exchanged NFTs, much like rings, by sending them to each other from their cryptocurrency wallets.
The record of them exchanging these virtual rings will be permanently stored on the Blockchain for all to see as proof of "our commitment to each other".
"The #blockchain, unlike physical objects, is forever. It is unstoppable, impossible to censor, and does not require anyone's permission. Just as love should be. What could possibly be more romantic than that?" Rose tweeted.
Earlier, the first tweet that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted to the microblogging platform in 2006 was sold as a NFT for about $2.9 million.
The artist Grimes recently sold several NFT items for nearly $6 million. An NFT of LeBron James making a historic dunk for the Lakers garnered more than $200,000.
On March 11, an NFT of a work by digital artist Mike Winkelmann sold for $69 million at Christie's, making him "among the top three most valuable living artists".
Non-fungible mean you can't exchange it for another thing of equal value.