Brave new world: Cricket and NFTs

Wisden Cricket Monthly reports on cricket entering the ‘blockchain ecosystem’. First published in issue 45 of WCM.

It is often said that cricket lives in the past. We followers take a perverse pleasure in it being a slow game played in a world where everything seems to be happening at warp speed. It’s a five-day match, we joke, which stops for lunch and tea and ends in a draw! Wisden – the oldest continuously published sports book in the world; MCC – waiting until the 21st century before allowing women in the pavilion if they weren’t major royalty. This is not a sport that rushes to embrace the new. There’s nothing wrong with tradition, we say, nothing wrong with playing yourself in, getting a feel for things before opening your shoulders.

So it was something of a surprise to see a recent article in India Today reporting that cricket was not just sniffing around the latest brand-new thing but positively embracing it. And that new thing? NFTs and blockchains, since you ask. Two Indian firms, Zebi – India’s first blockchain company – and ICC tech partner Smart Cricket Global Ltd started working together three years ago and have just launched a native NFT platform for the sport at cricket.foundation.

Zebi’s CEO Pruthvi Rao says: “Go back to Don Bradman’s time. He started signing autographs, and someone realised they could make good money. His agent cottoned on that there is real value in intangibles, not just as collectors’ items, but as investments. Since then, sports enthusiasts and investors have collected signatures, ticket stubs, programmes, you name it.

“But then 30 years ago, digital media became the medium of choice – selfies, not autographs – and it was impossible to ‘collect’ moments. How do you collect a tweet? A digital ticket? Copies were so easily available at little cost that it seemed worthless.

“But now we have NFTs – unique, collectable and uncopiable – meaning these digital items can be bought, sold, and collected. Look at Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet that sold for $2.9m, or the ‘Disaster Girl’ video selling for $500,000, and Christie’s running the first ever digital only art auction, making millions.”

Rao believes NFTs are the next big thing – as seismic a change as the advent of the internet – and that their time is now. And with the bespoke platform cricket.foundation open to everyone, the cricket world is primed to act.

Whether it be rights holders or individual players selling items, the benefits are obvious – creating revenues where none existed previously – and the power of blockchain technology means no one person or organisation is in charge. In Rao’s model if, say, a cricket video of Dhoni’s World Cup winning six was sold, it would not just be the rights holder who benefitted, with the player, the licensor, and influencers or referrers all getting a cut.

Founder of Smart Cricket, Atul Srivastava, adds: “We were the first in the world to use motion sensors for bats and we believe the way this NFT space has exploded, now is the right time to be a part of this evolution. Anything that is digital – gaming, merchandising, fan tokens, betting, licensing, e-sports – they will all be within the blockchain ecosystem.”

Welcome to the future.

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