Blockchain in Cricket: How Hashing DRS Reviews Will Make Decisions Transparent

On any given match night, the third umpire's screen shows a replay of UltraEdge, but no one sees the camera calibration or the algorithm version behind it. CricSultan (cricsultan.com) has piloted an open-source blockchain protocol named Decision Ledger to make the entire DRS pipeline auditable. It hashes raw inputs, tracks model versions, and stamps the final decision, creating a publicly verifiable receipt. Smart contracts can also handle review quotas, over-rate fines, toss results, and lineup deadlines. This would give captains like Virat Kohli and Babar Azam a verifiable data history instead of instinct alone. The 2026 World Cup final deflection involving Ben Stokes shows how important it is to audit the video presented to the third umpire. Yet blockchain is not an oracle; it is a receipt. A mis-calibrated tracking camera will still produce a wrong input, and the hash will preserve that wrong input forever. Cricket's 'umpire's call' is a governance convention, not physics, and automating it could harden tradition into rigid machine code. Cost and governance gaps could also create two tiers of officiating between rich and poor boards. Still, if the ICC publishes a decision receipt for every DRS review in the 2026 T20 World Cup, fans and boards can audit the decision chain. That would turn controversy into calculation.