Indian Railway train ticket booking system IRCTC has created NFT train tickets for the journey between New Delhi and Lucknow. Officially, the initiative is to celebrate the festival of colors, Holi, which falls on March 25. The NFT tickets will be available for train Tejas (82501/82502) from March 20 to April 12.
“These tickets are not merely digital souvenirs; they are a celebration of the rich cultural tapestry of Lucknow and Delhi. They symbolize our dedication to enriching your journey experiences, allowing you to personalize your travel memories with your own photographs and enjoy exclusive offers from handpicked brands,” IRCTC said in a post on X, along with a sample NFT ticket.
The NFT ticket and digital memorabilia will be issued without any additional charge. It will be delivered through WhatsApp and SMS link to the confirmed passengers, IRCTC clarified.
Highlighting the importance of the Indian Railways’ initiative, cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX’s CEO Sumit Gupta stated, “While this is a pilot program on the occasion of holi, around 11.8 lakh tickets are booked on IRCTC on a daily basis! This presents a great opportunity to make Virtual Digital Assets (VDAs) mainstream in India at a massive scale and also educate people about the benefits of #blockchain technology!”
On another note, India’s markets regulator has made a case for regulated markets to offer instant tokenized settlements to ensure investors don’t migrate to crypto.
Madhabi Puri Buch, Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), revealed plans to offer a same-day settlement cycle from March 28. Globally, stock market settlements take two days. However, China has implemented the same-day settlement cycle, while India plans to do so on an optional basis.
“If our well-regulated market cannot compete with the crypto world and cannot say we also offer you tokenization and instantaneous settlement over the medium term, I won’t even say long term, you should expect investors to move,” Buch said.
“Everybody wants instant everything. Right? So why should anyone believe that tomorrow, if an alternative is available with instant settlement tokenization and they say the regulated market doesn’t offer it, you should expect people to move,” she elaborated.
Earlier, ZyCrypto reported that India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) has created a new vertical—Centre of Excellence in Blockchain Technology (CoE-BCT)—dedicated to blockchain technology. It has also set up a new website, Government for Blockchain, and claimed 79 million government documents are stored on various government-owned blockchain networks.