Cricket's next multi-billion dollar evolution

A new NFT platform for cricket! Atul Srivastava, Founder of Smart Cricket and Pruthvi Rao, CEO of Zebi, in an interview to India Today, shed light on why the digital ecosystem of the sport is probably the biggest thing to happen to cricket, perhaps as big as, if not bigger than T20.

Sometime in late March 2021, Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet, dating back to 2006, was sold for about Rs 20 crore. In April, a joke photo of ' Disaster Girl' was sold for Rs 3.5 crore. There were trailblazing deals of digital memorabilia being reported across the world. They were being sold as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT). And in the world of cricket, there was a recent news item that there is a NFT platform for cricket being launched. So we thought we would dig a little deeper and spoke to Atul Srivastava, Founder of Smart Cricket and Pruthvi Rao, CEO of Zebi. The vision that comes across is that this is probably the biggest thing to happen to cricket, perhaps as big as, if not bigger than T20. Let us look back at history a little. Don Bradman first started signing autographs for his fans, and someone realized that they were being sold to others for top dollar. His agent immediately realised that there is a lot of value in 'intangibles', not only as collectors' items, but also as investment destinations. Ever since collectors and investors alike have made collections of a varied set of memorabilia that have appreciated in value over the decades. This ranged from ticket stubs to magazines, to autographs.