Indian Railways to issue NFT train tickets for world’s largest religious festival
Indian Railways (IR), the state-owned manager of India’s railway network, plans to issue non-fungible token (NFT)-based train tickets to transport pilgrims to Maha Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious festival.
The Hindu festival is of particular significance given that it only occurs once every 144 years.
ChainCode Consulting partnership
According to a report published by Indian news outlet Pune.news on Jan. 13, IR has collaborated with ChainCode Consulting, a Bangalore-headquartered enterprise blockchain development and consulting firm, to provide the digital tickets.
The Polygon blockchain has been chosen as the network upon which the NFT tickets will be minted. The tickets will then be made available to end users via NFTtrace, a real-world assets (RWA) tokenization and traceability platform run by ChainCode Consulting.
Long-running collaboration
Service users and railway personnel will be free to check the validity of tickets on the public blockchain.
This announcement is just the latest installment of a long-running collaboration between ChainCode Consulting and IR. In March 2024, a similar project was pursued by both parties. On that occasion, the collaboration involved the release of a series of NFT tickets for use on a train line running from Lucknow, the capital of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, to the Indian capital, New Delhi.
In that instance, NFTs were minted on the Hyperledger blockchain. A previous collaboration, earlier in 2024, saw NFTs minted on Polygon for digital tickets covering journeys to the sacred Hindu city of Ayodhya.
Commenting on the choice of Polygon relative to this latest collaboration, Alok Gupta, CEO of ChainCode Consulting, stated:
“By partnering with IRCTC and leveraging the Polygon blockchain, we are enabling a digital-first experience that complements the spiritual and traditional significance of the Mahakumbh while introducing a new level of engagement through NFTs.”
Polygon is an Ethereum ecosystem scaling network. With that, it has fast throughput and low gas fees and it's on this basis that it’s understood that Polygon was chosen in this instance. Aishwary Gupta, global head of payment and fintech at Polygon Labs, the key developer behind the Polygon blockchain, told Cointelegraph that public blockchains are playing an important role in doing away with middlemen and intermediaries.
The Polygon Labs executive stated that at both state and central government levels in India, Polygon has been used on a number of projects. He added:
”With its low cost and high throughput, we are sure that the NFTs being issued around Maha Kumbh Mela would be yet another great success.”
$94 billion market opportunity
Ticketing remains one of the proposed use cases for blockchain technology that has the potential to gain traction. That potential hasn’t gone unnoticed by ticketing industry leader Ticketmaster. In 2023 the company rolled out token-gated ticket sales. The feature enables artists to reward fans who hold NFTs with access to exclusive pre-sale events, prime concert seating and many other incentives and rewards.
NFT technology offers a solution to a number of issues experienced within the events industry, including ticket scalping, fake tickets and security issues. The live events business is a $94 billion industry, underscoring the opportunity available to be exploited by innovative NFT-based ticketing startups.
