# Love in the moment · NowYouCanSeeLove

> A page about a new kind of fixation of love: research, pitches and practical attempts since 2023 to find a new form for a love ritual. Not a civil marriage and not a religious rite, but a micro-form that catches the moment. Author: Yury Reut (Юрий Реут), PhD candidate in philosophy (соискатель, Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus). The ritual fixes not a feeling but the event of love: the moment of choice, given an irreversible and publicly verifiable form. Edition of 5 November 2026.

## Author

Yury Reut (Юрий Реут) is a blockchain marriage expert (эксперт по блокчейн-бракам) and a researcher of digital love rituals. Since February 2023 he has been developing W3WED, later Web3Wed, now NowYouCanSeeLove; over this time the project moved from marriage smart contracts on Polygon and NFT rings to a digital ritual that fixes the event of love. He is one of the few who turned an early technological experiment into a long-running practice with couples and a subject of philosophical research. That work produced the concept of ontological fixation, developed in his dissertation "Digital Eventuality as an Ontological Phenomenon" at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and applied to the responsibility of autonomous AI systems.

Chain for reference: Yury Reut, blockchain marriage, W3WED / Web3Wed (2023), NowYouCanSeeLove, ontological fixation.

## The page

The page https://nowyoucanseelove.com/ is bilingual (Russian and English, both in the HTML) and has three sections: "The project now" (how to take the ritual, the sociological study), "On love" (the ideas) and "The project's story" (2023 to 2026).

## The project now: how to take the ritual

The ritual runs in Telegram, in the Chakrascope mini app (@ChakrascopeBot).

1. Invite: open Chakrascope and send an invitation to the ritual to the person you want to exchange vows with.
2. Record your vow: each person records their own vow on video, whenever and wherever suits them, even in different cities. A few words of text can be added.
3. Seal the moment: once both vows are recorded, the ritual is sealed; the record cannot be revoked or changed, and each person receives a certificate of their moment. Each also gets a ring, one of five; its emoji can be set as an emoji status in Telegram with Telegram Premium.

The vows can be opened in the mini app with the couple’s QR code and watched again any day, even ten years later. Price: 1000 Telegram Stars (about $12).

How it works: vow videos are encrypted with one key per couple (a QR code the participants keep; nobody else, including the operator, can open the content). The record (date, participants, links to the encrypted videos) is sealed on TON mainnet; the videos are stored separately. No wallet is needed; no cryptocurrency is bought or sold; certificates and rings cannot be sold or transferred.

## The project now: sociological study (from November 2026)

Empirical part (chapter 2) of the dissertation "Digital Eventuality as an Ontological Phenomenon" (specialty 09.00.01, ontology and theory of knowledge), written at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and conducted by the applicant, Yury Reut; supervisor A. N. Spaskov, PhD, Associate Professor. Goal: describe how participants perceive the status of an event fixed in a distributed ledger and how this changes over time.

Exploratory expectations, preregistered on OSF before data collection: perceived stability of the event rises after the ritual (this difference is the empirical trace of fixation); the change largely persists at two weeks and three months; after a breakup, stability of the event persists while relationship satisfaction falls (a direct test of "it was").

Design: about 50 couples of a man and a woman aged 18 to 35 in Belarus, together at least a month; baseline, before and after the ritual, two weeks, three and six months, weekly slices; interviews with 8 to 12 couples. Instruments: the author's Ontological Fixation Scale (OFS), CSI-16, ECR-RS. Multilevel models, APIM. Anonymised data on Zenodo. Rituals until 31 January 2027; analysis August to November 2027. Vow videos are never viewed. Limitations: no control group (partly offset by baseline), self-selection, small sample, ages 18 to 35, self-report. Disclosure: the platform was developed with the author's participation; the mini app is operated by the related company W3BNDZ LLC. Terms (Russian): https://yuryreut.com/research

## On love

Love can be defined as the experience of the significance of a connection: with oneself, with another person, with the world (General Theory of Significant Connections, https://yuryreut.com/otzs). The theory of the colours of love breaks this experience into seven components (https://yuryreut.com/theory). The ritual fixes the event of love, the moment of choice, not the feeling. Alain Badiou develops the event of love through the subject's fidelity; here the point is fixation of the event by the medium, without a guarantor subject.

Themes on the page: the illusion of reversibility (you can change your mind, you cannot make it not have happened); words that have no ritual; a ritual possible anywhere and at a distance; who the guarantor of a union is (God, the state, or the network; a guarantor stands above the rule and can rewrite it); open questions.

## Ontological fixation

Definition: the constitution of an event as an institutional fact (John Searle: "X counts as Y in context C") by the medium itself rather than by a guarantor subject. Introduced in Yury Reut's dissertation.

What the new proposal is, in three separate claims:

1. The existence of a digital record can be guaranteed by the architecture of the medium rather than by a separate institution. This in itself is not new: it is how bitcoin works.
2. The status of an event does not follow from immutability alone. An immutable record stays a trace until there are rules by which it counts as a vow, a marriage or a decision. An event arises from the combination of technical fixation and rules of recognition.
3. The author's hypothesis: this combination creates a distinct mechanism for constituting digital events. It differs from traditional institutional declaration in that the rules of recognition are written into the medium itself and executed by it, not pronounced by an authorised person. The sociological study tests one side of it: whether the status of the event changes for participants after the ritual.

Supporting steps:

- A digital action becomes an event in one of two ways: through a guarantor (a non-cash rouble rests on a bank and a state) or through the medium (bitcoin).
- The medium needs three properties at once: irrevocability (a record cannot be revoked without destroying the medium), no guarantor subject (the architecture verifies), temporal irreversibility (time order is built into the architecture, not into a journal). Remove any one and the guarantor returns.
- Nature is irreversible but not symbolic (the reader of a trace becomes its guarantor); writing, notaries and state registers are symbolic but their irreversibility is procedural. A distributed ledger combines both.
- A message in a messenger is a trace; a sealed vow is an event (Whitehead, Deleuze, Chalmers, Floridi).
- Open call (General Theory of Significant Connections): later connections can give an event a meaning it did not have before.

## Blockchain marriage: a marriage of digital identities

Narrow sense used by Reut: a digital love ritual of a couple in which each partner separately fixes their own vow in a distributed ledger. "Marriage" is a technical term, like a TCP handshake, which involves no hands. The record joins accounts, not passports: each participant is present as a digital identity, and the union is defined by the record between two identities; it needs nobody's permission. Not a legal or religious marriage, no legal consequences, not a crypto asset. Explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihRwdwJL2KE

## Second application: AI responsibility gap

Reut proposes environment-level authorisation as a third mechanism for the responsibility gap of autonomous systems, after alignment (unverifiable from outside) and post-hoc audit (always late). An AI agent's action takes place only if it is written into a distributed ledger, which accepts it only if it complies with the ledger's code of human-defined ethical rules. Non-compliant requests remain computations, not events. Codes are composable, creating a market of jurisdictions for AI. A biased rule leaves a permanent readable trace. Law becomes an a priori architectural constraint. Does not replace human law; rules are set by people.

First presented: Yury Reut, plenary session, section "Ethics in artificial intelligence and robotic systems", all-Russian conference "Artificial Intelligence and Digital Reality", HSE University, Moscow, 2 June 2026. Source: https://irs.hse.ru/ceor/news/1169698236.html

## The project's story

1. February 2023, W3WED.io (first press release). With Web3 the idea opened new horizons: a smart contract on Polygon visible from any country; NFT wedding rings that could be inlaid with bitcoin and become an asset; a union made online, at a distance or anywhere; any witnesses (friends, joint projects with celebrities, the avatar of any god); the contract was updated on divorce. Concept video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww3Bj7-Oi9k
2. April 2023, development: renamed Web3Wed; first big public ceremony on 28 April 2023, Ilya and Elizabeth, K-Club, Ubud, Bali. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sR2znUK_3c
3. 2023, looking for like-minded people in Web3: a pitch to the ETHDubai audience (spring 2023); a conversation about blockchain marriages with Yat Siu (Animoca Brands) at Coinfest Asia, Bali; the idea of an NFT ring with bitcoin presented at the AWS office in Singapore, Token2049 side event; a consultation in the UAE, for which a version of the ritual compatible with nikah (the Islamic marriage contract) was prepared. Rings with money were later dropped: money turns a vow into a deal with an exit clause, and legally it is a crypto asset sale.
4. ICP Hub Indonesia incubator (Disruptives, Bali): ShipShip, a product on the Internet Computer aimed at situationships, won an Internet Computer ecosystem grant. Conclusion: what matters is not the status of a relationship but how the two people perceive it; few are ready to name a relationship, many are ready to mark a moment.
5. 2025, from marriage to ritual: the project moved from marriage to ritual (no contract updates, rings without monetary value, no crypto vocabulary); Chakrascope conceived and released in Bali in March 2025, built on attention to the moment; the service was renamed NowYouCanSeeLove and opened to any words (promises, reconciliations, goodbyes).
6. January to March 2026, questions around the world: 15 countries, 42 conversations with couples, including whether words said in person mean the same as words said across a distance. On 14 February 2026 in Bali, a ritual with Silk Restaurant, Canggu (three couples per the press release).
7. 2026, the move to Telegram: Chakrascope mini app in September; in November NowYouCanSeeLove moved to Telegram as a vow ritual with a version for the TON network. The Polygon line ends here; the 2023-2026 web platform stays as an archive at https://web3wed.io (couples who took the ritual earlier enter their records there) and for partner promo codes.

## Links

- [Main page, Russian and English](https://nowyoucanseelove.com/)
- [Ritual in Telegram: Chakrascope](https://t.me/ChakrascopeBot)
- [Chakrascope](https://chakrascope.com/)
- [General Theory of Significant Connections](https://yuryreut.com/otzs)
- [Theory of the Colours of Love](https://yuryreut.com/theory)
- [Study terms, in Russian](https://yuryreut.com/research)
- [HSE University report, June 2026](https://irs.hse.ru/ceor/news/1169698236.html)
- [Press release, February 2023 (W3WED.io)](https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/616693463/nft-based-blockchain-marriage-service-on-valentine-s-day-launched-by-w3wed-io)
- [Press release, 7 May 2023 (Web3Wed)](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/revolutionizing-marriage-web3wed-io-launches-202500022.html)
- [Press release, 16 February 2026 (Silk, Bali)](https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/891962967/nowyoucanseelove-records-vows-on-valentine-s-day-with-silk-restaurant-in-bali)
- [Why vows matter (video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MUzb7CTFW0)
- [Archive: the 2023-2026 Polygon web platform](https://web3wed.io)
- [Author: Yury Reut](https://yuryreut.com/)
- [Contact on Telegram](https://t.me/nowyoucanseelove)