Cricket's Blockchain Era: From Scoreboard to Smart Contract

Over the past few weeks, a question has been circulating in Bangladesh's cricket journalism forums: where will cricket's next major crisis come from? Some say bowling actions, others say match-fixing. But in my 38 years of notebooks, a different name has been accumulating the most entries — one that has not yet entered Bangladesh's fields but is making preparations: blockchain. I was sitting in the press box at Mirpur's Sher-e-Bangla Stadium watching a BCL match last year when a colleague asked me why ticket scalping never ends. Trying to answer, I realised the problem was not just the tickets — it was the system. The same system has left gaps in cricket's transfer market, age verification, match-fixing investigations and broadcast rights. Blockchain's biggest promise lies precisely here: not just money, but record integrity. In December 2026, a London-based firm announced it would sell tokenised ownership of a cricket franchise. The announcement never reached Bangladesh, but investors in Thailand, Dubai and Singapore are already curious. In this model, franchise ownership is cut into fractions, each recorded in a smart contract. The question is — how prepared is the economics of the game's organisation for this shift? Smart contracts run code, while cricket runs primarily on a web of informal decisions. Blockchain's most usable application is not in franchise ownership, but in age verification. The Bangladesh Cricket Board's age-verification controversy is a decade old. A player's birth certificate, school records and hospital documents come from three separate sources, and all three have occasionally shown discrepancies. If these three documents were entered into an approved registry — readable but unchangeable — every age dispute would have evidence in the record, not in someone's word. This aligns almost exactly with my three-source principle. A second practical application is in match-fixing investigations. Information exchange between the ICC and betting operators is unstructured, on paper and via email. If suspicious movement in betting markets were automatically logged on a chain, the ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit could receive instant notifications. The investigation would not become faster as much as it would gain its first seismographic evidence. In my own 2026 Zlatan audit, I saw that without records, you are forced to accept a biased colleague's word. The chain ends that compromise. A third use: broadcast rights and royalty distribution. In BCB and Bangladesh Premier League broadcast deals, revenue-share calculations happen multiple times a year, and every calculation raises questions about which club got how much. Smart contracts could automatically distribute match fees, broadcast royalties and performance bonuses — every transaction verifiable transparently rather than indefinitely. But the problems behind this glitter are not few. First, if the blockchain is public, all terms of players' contracts would become public. In cricket, contract information is commercial confidentiality; losing it means weakness in negotiations. Second, the regulatory framework needed for blockchain use in Bangladesh is still immature, and uncertainty over crypto transaction taxation is keeping investors away. Third and most important: technology by itself does not stop corruption. If people enter wrong data, the chain will make that error permanent. There is another gap — the untapped part of the ecosystem. Players, coaches, scouts and referees have not yet created chain-based identities. As a result, their participation in major transactions declines. A club in England did run a trial in 2026 — moving its ticketing system onto an approved chain, but a private one, because there was no risk of match data exposure. This kind of private chain may be the first step in cricket: recording student data, trail records and referee reports without the confidentiality risks of a public blockchain. The first footprint of blockchain in Bangladesh will likely be in ticketing. If the BCB wants to use chains for tickets in the 2026 domestic season, the entire scalping business will change — every ticket in an approved link with its user. It works on informal chains too, but if the BCB stays open, this will be the most visible reform. But when cricket a decade from now demands that everything — student ages, transfers and broadcasts — be brought onto the chain, the question is: has the Bangladesh Cricket Board prepared? Or will other boards around the world move a step ahead before preparations even begin?