Two Seasons of Blockchain in Cricket: Archives, Tokens and the Ledger

On an evening in March 2026, in a press box in Bengaluru, I saw something I still keep in my notebook. The screen in front carried the final of a domestic match. Two rows away, two young reporters were scrolling something else — an auction on a cricket NFT platform, where ownership of old video clips was changing hands as tokens. Someone said, “This is cricket's new media rights now.” Nobody asked for the score.

I wrote the date down, because I do not file a claim without a timestamp. That same month, an Indian cricket-NFT startup raised $100 million; the very next month, another raised $120 million. In cricket's digital economy it felt as if the product was no longer the game but ownership itself. Two years later, that ledger deserves to be turned — who profited, and who merely paid a fee.

The background needs setting. In late 2026, the International Cricket Council signed a deal with a platform called FanCraze to build digital collectibles from its video archive; the platform later launched its NFTs under the name Crictos. Around the same time, Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association joined hands with another platform, Rario, for NFT rights. In March 2026, FanCraze raised $100 million in a round led by Insight Partners; in April, Rario raised $120 million, led by Dream Capital and Alpha Wave Global.

Then came winter. Bitcoin, near $69,000 in November 2026, fell to around $16,000 by November 2026. On November 11, 2026, FTX filed for bankruptcy. For cricket boards, NFTs went from “future revenue” to “last season's experiment” almost overnight.

I write this from a particular vantage: in 2026 I was appointed one of three BCB advisors overseeing cricket's digital and media affairs. Sitting inside a boardroom, the gap between a token and a trophy feels sharper.

Cricket's greatest asset is not a star's six; it is the archive. From the 2026 tour of England to last month's domestic fixture, hundreds of thousands of hours of footage, scorebooks, interviews and old newspaper cuttings sit in the vaults of boards and broadcasters. The value of that archive lies in its continuity, its context — what happened before a ball, who said what, which match changed whom. The NFT market did not sell that continuity. It sold isolated highlights of a few seconds.

Cricket's first mistake with blockchain sits right there: it stripped the context out of the one asset whose price is context. A token can prove ownership, but ownership was never the cricket watcher's attraction — memory was, and memory does not divide into tokens.

This is where I go back to Bengaluru in 2026. When Bengaluru FC entered their first ISL season, the new digital outlets wanted clips after every session — instant, edited, built to travel. The rhythm of old print collided with the speed of new platforms. I learned at Bengaluru that a club's value sits not in the clip but in the routine behind it — 27 training sessions, 18 matches, Sunil Chhetri's 14 league goals and Miku's 15, each backed by a note with a date and a time. Clips get stolen; notebooks stay. The NFT problem is the exact reverse: throw away the notebook and try to make the clip alone the asset.

Then the money. In those two rounds, worth $220 million, the cash went to platform builders, to rights holders, and to the brokers sitting in between. The locker room taught me that the first transfer news often arrives as a cough — real information first comes as a whisper, and the whisper is usually about someone's commission. In digital rights, these middlemen are the least discussed cost. Whatever a player earned from a clip of his own catch, many times more accrued to a platform's valuation.

The third question is more uncomfortable: did any of this money reach the base of the game? It did not. The deepest part of the archive belongs to domestic cricket, women's cricket and smaller boards. The NFT lists carried only the moments television had already shown a thousand times — M.S. Dhoni's six in the 2026 World Cup final, some Virat Kohli innings, some Rohit Sharma stroke. An economy that buys only famous moments never builds a future archive; it merely charges interest on old glory.

My years of sitting beside the boundary tell me cricket's economic cycle is long: a five-day Test, a six-month series, a ten-year generation. The crypto market is its mirror opposite: a peak in months, a crash in months. A stopwatch and a notebook have been my oldest witnesses in football. Cricket works the same way — what cannot be measured cannot be trusted. Two clocks cannot run together, and cricket has always watched the slower one.

The common reading is that the crypto crash killed cricket's NFT plans, so the technology itself failed. The ledger says that reading is wrong. A cricket board's core income was never tokens; it was broadcast rights, sponsorship and ticketing. Tokens were an extra line, and when that line dried up, no board's budget broke. The failure was not of technology but of reading.

The second mistake runs deeper. Boards did not really buy blockchain; they bought a story called scarcity. Cricket's beauty is the opposite of scarcity — the more often a ball is watched, the more it means. If one six becomes one person's token, what is it to the other billion viewers?

And here is a question I cannot settle even for myself: if the technology genuinely works — stopping ticket fraud, monitoring corruption, bringing transparency to smaller boards' payments — why did cricket use it only in a market of speculation? I keep the beat, not the noise, because rhythm is how a club survives. The noise was always there. Where did the rhythm go?

Before the next window opens, boards need one decision: is the technology entertainment or infrastructure? My stopwatch says the festival market arrives fast and leaves fast; a ledger lasts. So the question is not who sold a token — the question is who will keep cricket's real ledger, and whether domestic cricket has a name in it.