How Blockchain Is Entering Cricket: Fan Tokens, Smart Contracts and the New Arithmetic of Franchise Markets

Last season, rain stopped play at a BPL match in Sylhet for roughly forty minutes. On the ground's scoreboard, ten overs of arithmetic were being logged. On my phone, a completely different scoreboard was running: the price of a cricket fan token, which fell seven percent inside those same forty minutes. That fall had zero relationship to the result, the pitch, or any player's form. It was tied to a tweet claiming the franchise was about to limit token holders' voting rights. That day I understood something: blockchain has entered cricket not to change the sport's arithmetic, but to change the arithmetic of the crowd's emotion. And the moment emotion gets a price, the game stops being a game. It becomes an asset, a market, a contract. I joined The Daily Star's sports desk in 2026. Back then, cricket journalism meant scores, quotes and match reports. Two decades later, on that same desk, cricket journalism means media rights, sponsorship valuation, auction prices and token economics. Blockchain is the newest entry on that list, and the least understood. Nobody knows exactly where the money goes, nobody knows who decides, and everyone is certain it is the future. The first blockchain wave in cricket arrived as digital memorabilia. In 2026, the International Cricket Council announced a partnership with a platform called FanCraze. The packs sold as "Crictos" were digital clips of match moments — a six, a catch, a stumping — with ownership recorded on a blockchain. Around the same time in India, another platform, Rario, entered the market with digital player cards and in February 2026 raised 120 million dollars in a round led by Dream Capital. FanCraze had raised 100 million dollars the same year, led by Insight Partners. The numbers sound magnificent, provided you don't know the rest of the story. The rest of the story is football. Between 2026 and 2026, a blockchain company called Chiliz launched fan tokens with major European clubs on its Socios platform. PSG, Juventus, Barcelona, Arsenal — everyone made a token. Each token carried a promise: holders would vote on club decisions. In practice those votes went to matters like the walkout song, the dressing room colour, or the opponent for a friendly. Who the coach would be, which players the club would buy, what a ticket would cost — holders had no hand in any of it. The model was clever: sell the feeling of voting rights, not the power. Cricket copied that model, late and at a smaller scale. The problem here is not technology, it is structure. In European football, a club is an independent business with its own board, its own shareholders, its own stadium. In South Asian cricket, the clubs are almost always licensed entities subordinate to a board. The BPL is run by the Bangladesh Cricket Board, the LPL by Sri Lanka Cricket. A franchise owner buys a licence to run a team, not permanent property. This is where blockchain's grandest promise takes its hit. The blockchain story is decentralisation — moving power away from the centre. Yet in this region's cricket, power has only concentrated further: in the board, in the president, in political appointments. Drop a fan token into that system and you don't get decentralisation. You get a new revenue line for the board. I began pulling at one thread, and the whole sport unravelled. The question I started with was simple: when an NFT of a catch is sold, who gets the money? The answer came in three steps. First the platform takes its commission, usually between two and five percent. Then the ICC or the relevant board takes its share, because they own the broadcast and the footage. Then the franchise or club takes its cut. The cricketer who actually took the catch signed no contract and receives no royalty. To me this is not really a blockchain question. It is a labour question. Across cricket's entire history, the player's body, skill and moment have all been sold, and ownership of all three has never rested with the player. Blockchain has only recorded that old inequality more clearly, permanently, in a way that cannot be erased. A public ledger pays nobody, but it remembers forever who got paid and who did not. I watched Mbappe run like an ideal, and then the market priced it. In the 2026 World Cup final, France beat Croatia 4-2, and a nineteen-year-old proved that his will was bigger than the system. That night I made a short video arguing France won because Mbappe refused to be a cog. Eight years later, I see the same story in cricket running in reverse: the cricketer is more of a cog than ever, because his name, his face, every second of his innings can now be sold separately. Now to the numbers, because numbers are this market's language. In 2026 the Board of Control for Cricket in India sold the IPL's media rights for five years for a total of 48,390 crore rupees. At the 2026 IPL auction, Mitchell Starc was sold for 24.75 crore rupees, becoming the most expensive player in the tournament's history. The previous year, Sam Curran fetched 18.5 crore rupees from Punjab Kings. Set against those figures, cricket's NFT and fan-token market is tiny — not a game of hundreds of crores, but of a few. Here is my first disagreement with myself. If the market is so small, why write about it? Because the size of a market matters less than its logic. Through the crypto winter of 2026, NFT trading volumes fell by more than eighty percent, Rario laid off staff, and many cricket NFT projects shut down quietly. Yet in exactly that period, BPL and LPL broadcast deals were growing, player salaries were rising, and the fight over franchise ownership was intensifying. The reason is simple. NFTs and fan tokens were products of emotion — you were buying a memory, a feeling, a status. Emotion's market rises and falls, and it never touches the sport's core economy. The second layer of blockchain is not emotional, it is arithmetic. That layer is the smart contract: money released automatically when conditions are met, without a human's permission. That is where the real story hides, and it is not remotely exciting, which is why nobody writes it. South Asian franchise cricket has two oldest complaints: players' payments arriving late, and agents' cuts being opaque. In Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, there have been repeated reports of players chasing unpaid wages for months after a tournament, some sending legal notices. Imagine splitting each contract's payment into three conditions — the day of signing, halfway through the tournament, and within seven days of the final match. Fulfil the condition and the smart contract releases the money. Nobody can hold it back, nobody can stall with an excuse about reconciling accounts. This is the most honest use of blockchain in cricket, and nobody is shouting about it, because it is not novel. Paying people on time is not a revolutionary idea. But in a system where withholding payment is a symbol of power, automatic payment is a redistribution of power. Boards and franchises will not surrender that power easily, because outstanding money in their hands is a form of control. Now imagine a fan token that truly granted voting rights. Say a BPL franchise let holders vote on three things: the team jersey's design, ticket prices at the home venue, and the retained players list. The last two are the most financially sensitive decisions a franchise makes. The second is direct revenue. The third is strategy that determines next season's fate. An owner will never give those up, because without them ownership is meaningless. So when I read fan-token marketing, I look for one specific sentence: what will the vote be about? The answer is almost always entertainment, never constitutional. This is not fraud, it is design. And the design was copied from football, where the experiment ended years ago with a clear result — clubs that gave holders no real power saw their tokens die. In Bangladesh the argument sharpens further. The BPL is board-owned, the franchises are licence-holders, and central revenue distribution has never been fully public. Add a new digital income stream to that structure and the biggest question becomes: who splits this revenue, and on what basis? Players get salaries, franchises get margins, the board gets reserves — and the people who bought the tokens get a badge and a newsletter. The LPL, ILT20 and SA20 have created a new geography where franchise ownership ignores national borders. The same consortium runs teams in multiple countries; the same player turns out on three continents in one season. In that system a borderless ledger sounds reasonable, because the player's labour is already borderless. The question is why ownership should remain fenced in when labour is not. I have watched the effect on players up close. In the T20 era, a cricketer is not one thing: he is a freelancer, a brand, a traveller and a dataset. Every number from his performance is recorded somewhere, but no term of his contract lives anywhere permanent. If blockchain does one useful thing, it could be a portable record of contracts that travels with a player from league to league. That is more necessary than it is glamorous. Still, I have learned to be wary of metrics that are easy to calculate and therefore treated as true. My old suspicion of xG in football has returned in cricket's token market in a new form. A token's price is not a measure of a fan's love; it is a measure of a fan's guess. And a guess changes daily, while love lasts a season. Now my second disagreement, this time with my own essay. I am arguing blockchain will not decentralise cricket, but it would be wrong to say the technology is useless. Technology is neutral; the question is who controls it. For Sri Lanka and Bangladesh there is a real possibility I do not want to undersell. The greatest damage to cricket in our region did not come from too little money; it came from opacity — fixing allegations, corruption, invisible board accounts, outside influence on selection. A public ledger, if it is genuinely public, could permanently record every payment, every contract amendment, every selection committee's verdict. That is not a revolution, it is an accounts book. But in cricket, an accounts book opening up is a small revolution. I may be blaming the wrong people: the problem is not technology, it is governance. A board that withholds payments today will keep the keys if it launches smart contracts tomorrow. A centralised authority running a decentralised ledger is no longer decentralised. It is a permissioned database wearing a blockchain label. In forty-seven years I have learned one thing to accept. Every new technology's first wave arrives on cheap money and the smell of a big dream, the second wave arrives with control, and the third arrives when nobody mentions the technology anymore and simply does the work. Email was revolutionary, then ordinary. Smart contracts will succeed the day nobody names them and money simply arrives on time. My fear sits elsewhere. I fear the emotional half of this market will stay in cricket and the accounting half will disappear. Emotional products sell fast; honest accounting buys you a bad reputation fast. A fan token gives a club money for nothing; a transparent payment system forces a club to pay. What one system gives a club, the other takes away. One thing I saw with my own eyes is the most reliable fact in this piece. In 2026, watching from Sylhet, I saw Shakib Al Hasan score 114 against New Zealand at Cardiff in the Champions Trophy. That night everyone wrote a fairytale. I wrote the opposite: this is not a fairytale, it is a warning. Bangladesh is living on the depth of one genius, and the system is bankrupt. After that piece travelled, it became clear to me that cricket's biggest stories are never about individual talent; they are about the system's arithmetic. In 2026, when Bangladesh won a T20I series against New Zealand, I sat in a television commentary box for the first time. From that box I have seen that the feeling of winning a series and the feeling of signing a contract are two entirely different things, even when both happen on the same evening. Blockchain is widening the distance between those two feelings. The token holder will get the joy of a series win; the player will get a contract whose terms nobody has read. I know many will read this and say I am exaggerating, that the market is still small, that cricket is still cricket. They may well be right. But rules must be set before a small market grows, otherwise the rules that form will serve owners, not players. We learned that lesson in the auction era. Starc's 24 crore rupees is not merely a price; it is a precedent that sets the ceiling for every argument of the next decade. My own reading says that within twenty-four months, at least one South Asian franchise league will place a portion of player payments on a blockchain-based ledger. It will be announced at a press conference, debated, then quietly rolled out, and nobody will remember who did it first. Alongside it, at least three new fan tokens will launch, and not one will grant constitutional voting rights. And the day a franchise genuinely hands token holders one real power — a veto on the retention list, say — cricket's history will split in two. The question, then, is not about technology. The question is who gives up power. So far, nobody has. And a sport that has learned to price its own players — how long before it prices its own fans?