Cricket's Blockchain Bubble: Fan Tokens, NFTs and the Smell of Money

March 2026. In a hotel ballroom in Mumbai, FanCraze announced that it had struck a deal with the International Cricket Council. On the big screen floated a digital collectible card of Sachin Tendulkar, and outside the ballroom a group of twenty-somethings waited, refreshing their phones again and again. A year earlier, in December 2026, another company called Rario had announced plans to sell digital collectibles of cricketers, with a giant like Dream11 standing behind it. From my twenty years of watching cricket, I can say that I have rarely seen such excitement away from the field. At the stadium gate, instead of scanning a ticket, a fan now scanned a QR code, and in return received a digital image whose claim of ownership was written on a blockchain. What was that image worth? Some said a few hundred rupees, some said a few lakh. That is where the real story begins.

The blockchain era in cricket really began with an accounting exercise. Between 2026 and 2026, when crypto and NFT markets worldwide were at their peak, three major cricket ventures — Rario, FanCraze and, internationally, Sorare — raised enormous sums from investors. In February 2026, Rario announced it had raised 120 million dollars led by Alpha Wave Global. In March of the same year, FanCraze said it had gathered 100 million dollars led by Insight Partners, along with exclusive deals with the ICC and the Cricket West Indies board. Sporta Technologies, the parent of Dream11, stood behind Rario.

Listening to those numbers, it seemed as though cricket fans had suddenly become owners of digital assets. But the arithmetic lay elsewhere. These companies were not really selling anything to fans — they were betting on an imagined future market. Investors poured in money in the belief that cricket's vast following would one day queue up to buy digital cards, just as they once collected cricket cards and stickers. In between stood a technology — blockchain — that offered a claim to prove ownership, but offered no real use for that ownership.

In 2026 I covered the A-League Grand Final in Melbourne, where I watched forty-one thousand spectators hold their breath through a penalty shootout. In 2026, in Rostov-on-Don, I watched Japan lose to Belgium in those fourteen seconds; after the match, Japanese fans were cleaning the stadium, and twelve folded shirts lay in the dressing room. Those two moments taught me that the real wealth of cricket or football is memory — it cannot be written on a card, cannot be locked in a blockchain.

So why did cricket boards rush toward blockchain? The answer lies in the financial structure. The pandemic had cut stadium revenue, and uncertainty over sponsorship deals was growing. Right then, NFTs and fan tokens arrived as a kind of new revenue door. The benefit to a board was clear: by creating a little digital material and licensing it, a large sum of advance money could be raised. Here the on-field result was secondary — the main task was to build a story so that investors would believe the size of this market would multiply in future.

The fan token model was even clearer. By buying a token, a fan could vote on club decisions — which jersey, which slogan, who gets a chance to meet the fans. In practice this voting right was almost symbolic, because the decisions were already made. The token's real work was not to make the fan a partner in decisions, but to turn the fan into a permanent buyer and to give the club a new revenue stream. Between 2026 and 2026, European football clubs walked this path, and the same experiment began in the cricket world. Here lies my first objection. Blockchain does not bring democracy to cricket; it adds a new layer of ownership. Previously a fan bought a ticket, bought a jersey, kept the memory. Now one more thing is being bought from the fan — a promise of the future, priced by the market, not by the fan's love.

My second observation concerns fantasy sport. Platforms like Dream11 are the bridge between cricket and blockchain. But one end of that bridge was entertainment, the other was investment. When the same company teaches a fan to play the game and also persuades that fan to buy an NFT, the relationship between fan and player slowly turns into one between customer and seller. To me that is a sign of cricket changing character, not merely of business changing.

One thing must be added here, which many skip — the player market. Cricket has no transfer window like football; it has auctions. But the blockchain wave changed the language of those auctions too. If a star's NFT fetched a high price, for an agent that became evidence of his market value. In other words, the price of a digital card and the figure in a player's contract began feeding each other. The investment bubble therefore stayed not only on phone screens but entered the economics of the dressing room.

Now to the reality of the numbers. When the crypto market began to fall from mid-2026, the position of these companies changed. NFT prices dropped, new buyers stopped coming, and investors began withdrawing money. In 2026 Rario announced layoffs, and FanCraze's operations contracted. Those who had bought NFTs saw the value of a digital card fall from a few lakh to a few hundred — while the money spent to buy it never returned. One fact is worth remembering here: cricket NFTs and fan tokens were never created for fans; they were created for investors, and fans were made the fuel of that market.

Now to the side everyone avoids. When blockchain entered cricket, everyone said it would make the game more transparent, give fans power, even help grassroots cricket. The opposite happened. Where the money was poured, there went the names and logos of star cricketers; where money was needed, there went neither grassroots nor women's cricket. If even a fraction of the profit from selling a star's image on a digital card had gone to club cricket, women's cricket or small-town grounds, I would speak of this technology differently. But it did not happen.

Another matter — the story of blockchain's transparency. However transparent the technology, the ownership behind it was not so transparent. Who held how many tokens, who sold when — such information was beyond an ordinary fan's reach. Recording a transaction and understanding the meaning of that transaction are two different things. In this chapter of cricket, the second was never made clear.

My third objection is to the small-team-beats-giant kind of story. Fan token advertising claimed that small clubs could raise money like big clubs and competition would be equal. But in reality a token's price depends on a team's big name, the number of stars and the power of its publicity. Nobody buys a small club's token, because there is no big star behind it. So a system meant to bring equality in fact opened another revenue stream for the big and another competition for the small. Financial inequality was not resolved here; it returned wearing new clothes.

So is everything about blockchain in cricket a failure? Not so. The technology can reduce ticket fraud, manage digital fan memberships, even make player contracts and ownership records transparent. The right question is not whether blockchain will come to cricket; the question is whether it will come in the service of fans or in the accounts of investors. Looking toward 2026, I see that the projects surviving are moving from the story of price to the story of use — digital tickets, fan identity passes, preserving memories in limited numbers. Those who told only the story of price have effectively disappeared.

In my notebook that night of 2026 is still written — a seventy-one-year-old member of the Victory club, standing quietly near the gate after the match. No token, no NFT can hold that silence. Cricket's true ownership is not on a card, not on a blockchain — it is in the fan's memory. If the sport forgets that, then however advanced the technology, that held breath in the stands will be lost.