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• Sheel Mohnot, a venture capitalist, and Amruta Godbole, a product lawyer, got engaged in August 2022.
• Soon after, the couple won a contest to have a wedding in the metaverse sponsored by Taco Bell.
• Take a look at their metaverse wedding and live reception afterwards at the “world’s most beautiful Taco Bell.”

Sheel Mohnot, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who co-founded the firm Better Tomorrow Ventures, was looking for love.

During the pandemic, a mutual friend introduced him to Amruta Godbole, a lawyer at Instagram. Their first phone call in May 2020 was almost six hours long.

Soon after, they had a socially distanced date in Mohnot’s backyard. Cue a whirlwind romance in which they biked through Burning Man’s Black Rock City and spent an evening in a six-person Slovenian village — by August 2022, they were engaged.

Just weeks later, the couple saw an unexpected opportunity. Taco Bell was calling on prospective couples to apply to the brand’s “first-ever, virtual legal and metaverse wedding package.”

Mohnot said “it was perfect timing.”

Applicants were asked to submit a registration form and video detailing their unique love story. The prize would be a Web 3.0 wedding for “two die-hard enthusiasts to take their Taco Bell love to the next level,” the contest announcement promised.

Mohnot was eager to enter the contest because he had long had an affinity for Taco Bell. He said growing up in the US as a vegetarian in the late ’80s and ’90s “it was the only place that you could go for fast food,” so going out to eat became “kind of synonymous with Taco Bell.”

The couple also had a date early in their relationship at the oceanfront Taco Bell in Pacifica, California. “So it had meaning for us in that way, too,” Godbole said.

They submitted a video homage to Taco Bell before the contest’s deadline in early September 2022, and by October, they found out they had been selected out of more than 300 submissions.

In the video, Godbole mentioned that Taco Bell was one of the first things she and Mohnot had bonded over as vegetarians who loved Mexican food.

Mohnot put the final touch on the video when he cracked open a ring-shaped case — to reveal an actual wedding band — and earnestly asked, “Taco Bell — will you marry us?”

In the months leading up to the wedding, Godbole said they had planning sessions with Taco Bell’s team every few weeks. During those meetings they discussed everything from “the menu” (which was fully vegetarian, of course)…

to the construction of the wedding venue…

to customized metaverse outfits for their wedding guests, like a printed coat…

…or a flame-inspired dress.

They even shortlisted a few names for their emcee. The spot ultimately went to the actor Kal Penn, who starred in the Harold & Kumar series.

Mohnot said he rarely saw Indian-Americans on television when he was growing up, but Penn was one of the first actors in the community to make it to the big screen. “So it’s very special for me to have him,” Mohnot said.

Someone close to the couple, who was not on the metaverse broadcast, actually officiated the ceremony.

Wedding day was slated for February 24. The couple initially planned to be in the company of a few friends dressed in Snuggies. At the last minute though, Godbole put on a dress and Mohnot donned a sherwani, a traditional Indian long-sleeved coat.

The wedding drew viewers from across the world. Below, are the couple’s friends from San Francisco gathered together for a watch party.

Mohnot’s grandmother even tuned in from India. Approximately 1000 guests attended the wedding as avatars in Decentraland.

In traditional Indian weddings, the groom often arrives in a celebratory procession known as the baraat, accompanied by family members and live music. Mohnot chose to ride in on a purple elephant in his metaverse baraat.

Godbole then floated in wearing a custom designed pink lehenga— a traditional Indian outfit comprised of a cropped top, full-length skirt, and long scarf.

Once the couple took their places at the altar they exchanged vows. Their promises to one another ranged from silly to practical to romantic.

Mohnot promised Godbole that he would always help her look for her AirPods and keep her phone charged. He also vowed to “never let let our love become stale and to always keep everything spicy and exciting.”

Godbole, who was acknowledged as the better writer of the two, promised Mohnot that their married life would be “fun and romantic and more than a little weird, just like today.”

…officially husband and wife!

After the ceremony, guests proceeded to the reception hall which was decked out with a cheese fountain and towering Cinnabon Delights cake. Guests heard speeches from the couple’s friends and soon everyone’s avatar was twirling on the dance floor.

The day after, the couple gathered with friends and family at the Taco Bell in Pacifica for a live reception. Later this year, the couple will have a destination wedding near Mexico City.

The couple will also have receptions in Godbole’s hometown of Cleveland and Mohnot’s hometown of Pittsburgh.

Mohnot mentioned that the couple already had an event in India ahead of their metaverse wedding.

Amid so many celebrations Godbole said the Taco Bell metaverse wedding stands out not only as their legal wedding, but as an event that drew together loved ones from across the world. “We were definitely not planning to be married by now,” Godbole joked, “that was unexpected.”

Free-trade zones in the UAE are areas where entrepreneurs have 100% ownership of their businesses and have different regulatory frameworks and tax schemes.

Ras Al Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirate’s (UAE) seven Emirates, is set to launch a free zone for digital and virtual asset companies as the country’s approach to the industry continues to attract global crypto players.

The RAK Digital Assets Oasis (RAK DAO) will be a “purpose-built, innovation-enabling free zone for non-regulated activities in the virtual assets sector.” Applications will open in the second quarter of 2023, the statement said.

The free zone will be dedicated to digital and virtual assets service providers in emerging technologies, such as the metaverse, blockchain, utility tokens, virtual asset wallets, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), decentralized applications (DApps) and other Web3-related businesses.

“We are building the free zone of the future for companies of the future,” said Sheikh Mohammed bin Humaid bin Abdullah Al Qasimi, chairman of the RAK International Corporate Centre, the operator of the new free zone. “As the world’s first free zone solely dedicated to digital and virtual asset companies, we look forward to supporting the ambitions of entrepreneurs from around the world.”

Free zones or free-trade zones are areas where entrepreneurs have 100% ownership of their businesses and have their own tax schemes and regulatory frameworks, except for the UAE’s criminal law.

Drawing up the new free zone’s steps, Dubai-based crypto lawyer Irina Heaver thinks “RAK DAO will start with non-financial activities first, then may introduce the financial activities at a later stage.” She added:

“[Entrepreneurs] won’t be able to launch a crypto exchange just yet, which is an ESCA-regulated financial activity.”

The Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA) is one of the UAE’s main financial regulators. According to the country’s latest federal-level virtual assets law, the SCA has authority throughout the Emirates, except for the financial free zones — the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and others, which have their own financial regulators.

The new free zone adds to the more than 40 multidisciplinary free zones in the country that have attracted numerous crypto, blockchain and Web3 firms, including the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), DIFC and the ADGM.

The UAE has painted itself as a forward-thinking hub for crypto firms eyeing jurisdictions with friendlier regulations. In March 2022, Dubai unveiled its virtual assets law, along with the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority, to protect investors and provide standards for the digital asset industry.

In September 2022, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority — the regulator of the ADGM — published guiding principles on its approach to regulating and overseeing the new asset class and its service providers.

February and March are all about the major global fashion weeks. This year, March culminates with Metaverse Fashion Week. OVER is working tirelessly to organize an unprecedented MVFW and in February signed up some very special partners to make their AR-powered fashion gathering in Milan (March 28-31) a roaring success.

Be sure to follow OVER on socials, to make sure you don’t miss any updates on how AR technology is taking fashion to the next level.

Don’t be fooled by its emptiness: Block 776,339 plays as important a role as busier blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin is known for its robustness, security and predictability. Every 10 minutes — on average — the blockchain produces a new block, and the successful miner earns a block reward of 6.25 Bitcoin (BTC), around $130,000.

However, every once in a while, the Bitcoin blockchain surprises observers and participants.

At block height 776,339, nodes across the network verified a completely empty block. The block was added to the Bitcoin blockchain with zero included transactions, leading to some confusion among the crypto community. So, what exactly is an empty block, and how does it happen?

First, while an empty block might seem strange at first, it’s actually a normal occurrence on the network. The last time it occurred was a little over two weeks ago, in block 774,486.

Miners are incentivized to mine blocks as quickly as possible, and sometimes, they mine a block before they have received any transactions to include. When this happens, the block remains empty.

The Bitcoin mempool, the go-to space for analyzing the Bitcoin blockchain, offers the following explanation: “When a new block is found, mining pools send miners a block template with no transactions so they can start searching for the next block as soon as possible. They send a block template full of transactions right afterward, but a full block template is a bigger data transfer and takes slightly longer to reach miners.”

“In this intervening time, which is usually no more than 1–2 seconds, miners sometimes get lucky and find a new block using the empty block template.”

In essence, the miners “got lucky” by mining a template. In this instance, the Bitcoin block at height 776,389 was added mere seconds after its predecessor, 776,488. ‎However, block 776,388 earned an extra 0.086 BTC or $1,854 in fees, which was added to the block reward of ‎6.25 BTC or $135,247.

Even though an empty block doesn’t contain any transactions, the miner still receives the block reward of the newly minted Bitcoin. As such, block 776,389 was awarded 6.25 BTC — no transaction fees. Binance Pool was the winning miner, which contributes as much as 12% to the total hash rate.

It’s important to note that empty blocks are not a problem for the network. By mining empty blocks, miners still produce the coin generation transaction, also known as the coinbase transaction, which keeps Bitcoin steady on its path to reaching 21 million BTC issued.

Related: Public miners increased Bitcoin production, hash rate in January

According to data from BitInfoCharts, the percentage of empty blocks on the network is usually around 1%–2%. The stat is more surprising today, given the rise of “ordinals” on Bitcoin, or the ability to permanently etch pictures, data and stamps onto the blockchain.

The rise in ordinals has provoked some questions and even concern among the Bitcoin community, and the first instances of pornography were recently recorded. The mempool has been increasingly busy, and block space has been contested for as some JPEG enthusiasts scramble to contribute their art to the Bitcoin blockchain.