Trust on the Chain: Cricket's New Scoreboard, and Those Still Keeping Score in Notebooks

On a county ground in England, I have watched two generations sit side by side. The father kept a battered notebook, writing each run in ink — a fold at the corner of the page, a fresh box after every over. Beside him, his son flicked through an animated card on his phone, a six from some cricketer spinning forever. What the father wrote will rot away; what the son watched can never be deleted. One ground, one ball, two ledgers.

I live in Liverpool, I was born in Pakistan, and thirty-three years of my working life have been spent at the edge of cricket grounds. That afternoon left a question lodged in me: when the game hands over its accounts, its memory and its money to a new ledger, who is doing the writing — and who is having it written for them?

What the ledger actually is

There is no need to dress blockchain in mystery. It is a kind of accounts book that does not live in one hand but on many computers at once. Whatever is written spreads everywhere, and overwriting an old page is close to impossible. A smart contract is the condition written inside that book — ‘payment clears, rights transfer’, ‘this instalment on this date’, ‘this penalty if the term is broken’ — enforced by code rather than by people. A token is a small slice of that ledger, tradable; an NFT is a token with its own identity, so one cannot be swapped for another.

Cricket has been peeking at this ledger for several years. In 2026 the International Cricket Council moved into cricket collectibles, and in March 2026 FanCraze announced it had raised a 100 million dollar Series A led by Insight Partners, a large share of which went into building cricket collectibles. The way Barcelona or Paris Saint-Germain sold fan tokens in football, cricket's franchise leagues are now groping for the same path.

The arithmetic behind it matters. The Indian Premier League, the Pakistan Super League, the Big Bash, The Hundred, ILT20 — behind each sits a river of broadcast rights, ball-by-ball data, image rights and sponsorship money. Whoever supplies the ball-by-ball feed holds much of the throttle on the betting market. A single shot from Virat Kohli or Babar Azam can move a billion-dollar market. In that reality, a new ledger is not merely technology; it is a question of whose hands hold the money.

Where the chain genuinely helps: the gate line and the black-market ticket

Waiting at a stadium gate is an old habit of mine. Eden Gardens, Wankhede, Lord's, Edgbaston — the scene repeats: a man running up with a ticket, and behind him a shadow whispering resale prices. A family stopped at the turnstile over a forged ticket, an infant in arms, sandwiches in a bag. Once a ticket becomes a unique token, every seat has its own identity, a scanned ticket cannot be reused, and if someone tries to resell at a markup the smart contract caps the price itself — not above this line, and a share of every resale returns to the club.

The practical gain sits here. Money that currently ends up with touts and forgers can partly return to the club's ticketing revenue, and a slice of that eventually reaches the pay of the pitch curator and the security guard. My years of watching from the stands tell me cricket crowds are the most patient part of any society — they queue for hours, but once cheated they do not come back.

Yet the reality at the gate is far muddier than the technology. Outside a stadium, a mobile network that must scan thousands at once often collapses; the father with the notebook has no smartphone and no bank account — how does he buy a token? If digital ticketing serves only the digitally fluent young, the old Test crowd will slowly be left outside the turnstiles. Technology can be the answer here, on one condition: the door must stay open to everyone.

Smart contracts, agent cuts and the small board's books

Auction night is cricket's strangest ritual. The paddle rises, the price climbs, and a teenager's life turns over in seconds. That same night holds its darkest corner — who got what, who took which cut, whose hand passed the money on. In domestic cricket in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, match fees sometimes sit unpaid for months; where image-rights money disappears, the player himself does not know. A smart contract can work precisely here: match fees arriving automatically on a fixed date, image rights splitting by the terms of the deal, and the modest revenue of an associate board becoming visible instalment by instalment — nobody gets room to keep a hand in the middle.

For young stars like Shubman Gill or Shaheen Afridi this transparency matters more, because the weight of domestic and international cricket sits on their shoulders at once. But money also comes from below. When an academy in a small town signs a fourteen-year-old, nobody has ever read that paper — not the boy, not his father. This is my deepest fear: scouting networks find genius in developing countries and, in the same motion, manufacture ‘football lottery’ families. If the chain makes that contract transparent, it protects; if it turns that fourteen-year-old's future itself into a token sold on a market, it becomes a crueller lottery still.

Data, betting and the darkest room

The biggest buyer of cricket data is the betting industry. Before a ball pitches, its price has already swung in the market, and what the data suppliers do at night is something the ordinary viewer never learns. This room is the darkest side of the game's datafication. Blockchain can do one thing here — mark the provenance of information. Which ball, in which over, from which supplier, at what time, stays in a ledger that cannot be erased. At least the attempt to catch who altered what becomes possible.

But a hard truth sits here too. The chain stores exactly what is written into it — true or false. If the information comes from a bad hand, the error will be carved in stone forever. Think of the 2026 spot-fixing scandal — how deeply that night shook cricket's trust is something we have not forgotten. Anti-corruption units investigate, but the problem begins before the investigation, when the flow of data and the flow of money run through the same hands. Technology that merely records cannot change a culture.

Collectibles, memory, and the fan without dollars

The most seductive promise of the NFT is memory. A Kane Williamson cover drive, that Ben Stokes innings at Headingley, a Jos Buttler six — if a piece of these ever fades, a digital collector can hold it. The father's notebook will rot; the son's card will not — that was the lesson of the opening scene. Cricket's memory economy has always existed: old scorebooks, signed bats, ticket stubs. The chain wants to give that economy a new platform.

But the biggest audience for this market — the fan watching in a lane in Karachi, Lahore, Sylhet or Dhaka — has no dollar card. That six becomes valuable to him when he can show it to his son, free. The sharp NFT crash after 2026 tells exactly this truth: collecting and investing are two different things, and the real beauty of cricket collecting lies in its illiquidity.

The name of the man cutting the grass

I sat in Qatar in 2026 and saw the faces of the workers who built the stadiums, and since then my eyes go at every big ground to the people whose names nobody knows. The Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad — a structure for one hundred and thirty-two thousand spectators: who built it? If the chain truly brings transparency, the first test of that transparency is not the star's ledger but the labourer's wage sheet. The contractor's payment for stadium construction, the daily wage of the gardener cutting the pitch grass, the weekly account of the labourer who pulled the boundary rope — transparency here means fewer places to hide an injustice.

The glamorous tokens and cards arrive first; the boring but essential payment systems arrive last of all. Cricket's strength was never in its stars but in this crowd of unnamed people behind them.

The question the chain cannot answer

Now to the place where blockchain announcements ring loudest and the argument is thinnest. The whole foundation of the chain rests on a silent assumption — that the information pulled into the ledger from outside is true. In the language of the technology this is the ‘oracle problem’. The scoreboard, the ball-tracking, even the umpire's decision — all arrive from outside, and that outside door is the weakest point. A ledger that never forgets, if filled with false information, will keep the game's history false forever — with no way to erase it.

The second objection runs deeper. Decentralisation sounds lovely, but in practice token prices are set in dollars, and the liquidity is supplied by South Asian fans. They buy and push the price up, then outside investors take the profit. This is not a new freedom; it is an old extraction in new packaging. And above all — grief, joy, anticipation are not commodities. The Coutinho vigil begins when the deal dies, not when it is born. Every transfer window is a collective funeral dressed in breaking-news yellow. Auction night carries the same mourning. No chain can split that grief into tokens, because grief has no price — only witnesses.

The last ledger

Cricket returns to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, and the curtain rises on the 2026 T20 World Cup right in this period. The question is no longer whether the technology arrives; it is who it arrives for. The Silent Kop taught me that empty seats still sing in the memory. I write the roar after it has gone, because that is where the truth lives. Will the memory of our game be stored in a cold, untouchable ledger, or in the fold of someone's trembling hand-written scorebook — that answer will be given by the fans, not by the technology.