Blockchain and Cricket: The Ledger Beyond the Pitch That No One Can Erase

On an April evening last year I stood outside the gates of Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. In my hand there was no paper ticket, only a QR code on a phone screen, and behind that code sat a blockchain ledger. The ticket was an NFT, a unique digital asset whose ownership, once written, cannot be altered. A gentleman standing beside me glanced at my screen and said, "Sir, this ticket can never be lost now." I laughed. But beneath that laugh lay a question that still does not leave me — whose ledger is this, really? Who writes it, who reads it, and who can tear out a page if they wish?

I kept the diary; the diary kept me. For forty-eight years I have written cricket's books — scorebooks, press-box notebooks, dates scrawled by hand on bus windows. In 2026 I spent fifty-four days with Bengaluru FC and filled eleven notebooks, and from that diary came a twelve-thousand-word serial. The silent dressing room of the 2026 bio-bubble taught me that the game is not only a sum of runs and wickets; behind it sits the arithmetic of people. And in Russia in 2026 I sat where the fan sits and learned what VAR cannot see. That same lesson has returned in a new wrapper — this time the technology is called blockchain.

Cricket's relationship with blockchain is not a sudden fashion. In February 2026 FanCraze signed a long-term deal with the ICC and entered cricket's digital collectibles market; in April of the same year India's platform Rario raised 120 million dollars led by Dream Capital. The numbers are large, but the real story for me is not in the numbers. It is that a league's ticketing, player payments, sponsor contracts and anti-corruption data are all being placed on the same kind of distributed ledger.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed ledger: the same information is stored on many computers, each new entry is linked to the cryptographic hash of the previous one, so altering an old page breaks the whole chain. In cricket I can see three practical uses. First, ticketing — NFT tickets can reduce black-market touting, because every ticket's ownership and sale history is written on-chain. Second, fan engagement — fan tokens let spectators vote, or spend tokens on jerseys and VIP experiences. Third, contracts and payments — smart contracts can release payment automatically on a fixed date, which may help smaller leagues where salaries are delayed.

My "Fan's Seat" column ran for three years. There I wrote the same thing again and again — a technology only matters when it changes the experience of the ordinary spectator in the stand. For blockchain, my yardstick has not moved.

Blockchain does not tell the truth; blockchain only remembers. That is my central observation. If false information is entered into a chain, the chain will preserve that falsehood perfectly, forever, across many copies. The technology does not guarantee truth — it guarantees immutability. In cricket administration that difference is life and death, because our boards' problem is usually not lost information; it is who controls the information, and who can independently verify it.

Suppose a franchise league puts player payments on-chain. It will look beautiful. But the question is — who validates the chain? If four validator nodes all run on the league owner's server, that is not a blockchain; it is merely an expensive database with the word "web3" written beside it. The lesson I took from Qatar in 2026 applies directly here: the real question of any system is not "what can the technology do" but "whose hands hold the power".

The most promising area for blockchain in cricket, I think, is ticketing — and precisely there lies the biggest risk. Digital tickets reduce touting but do not eliminate it. Touts no longer buy tickets; they buy wallets with bots. If an NFT ticket is transferable, it will be resold on the market — and the royalty the club earns from that secondary sale depends on the percentage written into the smart contract. If a club keeps a five percent royalty, then from every ticket a fan buys, a slice keeps returning to the club's cash box. That sounds good. But if a ticket with a face value of 500 rupees sells for 5,000 rupees on the secondary market, the extra 4,500 rupees travels from the fan's pocket to the tout's pocket, while the club receives only 225 rupees. In other words, the technology does not redistribute most of the profit; it returns only a small slice.

Then there is the environmental account, the least discussed in a country like India. Proof-of-work chains consume enormous electricity per transaction; proof-of-stake or chains like Polygon consume far less, but not zero. If forty thousand spectators at a stadium each conduct one on-chain transaction, what is the combined energy cost — I have still not seen that question in any board's annual report.

There is another layer I call the player passport. Many proposals exist — every player's injury record, fitness data and contract history held on one chain, so information is not lost when a club changes. The idea is elegant, but right here lurks the question of privacy. I once did not write about what happened inside a dressing room, because that would have broken trust. But if every injury detail of a player is written forever on a distributed ledger, then who can buy that information? An insurance company? A future club? A fan? Does the player know whose hands his body's ledger is entering?

In the transfer market this technology holds another temptation — automatically enforcing contract conditions, such as a bonus after a set number of matches. But a smart contract only cleans the accounting; it does not reduce the risk. Looked at from the other side, it becomes clear that clubs pour so much money into future promises precisely because of a lack of verifiable data — three-figure millions in euros are being chased for a twenty-one-year-old who has not played fifty matches. The chain does not remove that darkness; it rather helps make the price look more credible.

And there is the grassroots question. Academies run by former stars are often branding, while the budget for coach education stays unchanged year after year. If blockchain truly brings transparency, it is needed first of all in the accounts of these small budgets — where the money went, which coach received training, how much reached which small town.

The conventional view says blockchain will make cricket corruption-free. I do not believe it. Corruption happens in people's minds, not in ledgers. From the 2026 spot-fixing scandal to the 2026 bio-bubble, in every case I have seen, the problem was not a lack of information — it was the advantage of hiding information. Blockchain makes hiding information harder, that is true. But if the underlying data is corrupted before it ever reaches the chain, then the chain will only immortalise corrupted information.

The second misreading is to treat blockchain as a tool for player welfare. In November 2026 I spent twenty-eight days in Qatar and wrote a nine-thousand-word investigation into the condition of migrant workers. The lesson I took was this: technology can reduce friction, but it does not restore dignity. A smart contract can release a salary on a fixed date; but who decides whether that salary's figure is fair? That is not a question of technology, it is a question of negotiation. In January 2026 I broke the news of Bengaluru FC's twenty-one-year-old midfielder Arjun Nair's surprise loan to Qatar SC, after spending eighteen days at the club's pre-season in Bellary. From that story I learned that a transfer can be announced in one line, but its human cost is paid over months. The chain does not account for that cost.

So is blockchain cricket's enemy? No. But seen from the fan's seat, this technology's first duty is to prove itself — as an open, neutral, verifiable ledger whose validators are independent, whose data anyone can read, and whose benefits return to the ordinary spectator's pocket.

I know it because I kept the diary — changing the book does not change history; who keeps the book decides history. In the coming years the real signal in cricket administration will be this: will any board open its payment, ticketing and data ledgers to independent audit? If not, then however high the blockchain flag flies, the view from the fan's seat will remain the same — a closed door, and people waiting in front of it.