The New Ledger Outside the Ring: Blockchain, Records and the Audience's Notebook in Bangladesh's Combat Sports

The door to the hotel ballroom was open. Inside, forty chairs, one behind another, and in front of them a tripod, and on the tripod a phone that was broadcasting live. The forty people in the chairs were judges, managers from both corners, two families, and a few journalists. On the other side of the screen there were twelve thousand people. A fighter stepped onto the scale. The room temperature did not change, nobody clapped, but a young man standing beside the table scanned a code, and on his screen the fighter's name, date of birth, weight and the results of his last four fights rose up in sequence. That evening it became clear that the question was no longer only who would win. The question was: how true is what we are watching, and whose job is it to prove that truth? I was standing in that Dhaka ballroom in 2026, when the weigh-in for XBC 3.0 was taking place. Muhammad Utshob Ahmed's ten-round WBC Asia Silver title bout was at the centre of that card. Forty chairs in the room, twelve thousand views on Facebook Live — the gap between those two numbers became the centre of my writing that day. Because hidden in that gap was the real crisis of our combat sports: attendance has fallen, but attention has risen; the audience has left the chairs but returned to the screens. And the technology that can tie these two worlds into one thread is called blockchain. I began watching combat sports in a fan zone in Karama, in the summer of 2026, on the night of the World Cup final. About four hundred South Asian workers had gathered there to watch France–Croatia. My course required a fifteen-hundred-word field report, and I titled it 'Nobody Came Here for the Score.' That September my uncle, who had once been a boli khela wrestler, took me to a Bangladeshi-run boxing gym in Al Quoz. Twenty-two members, one heavy bag, training until one in the morning. From that day I stopped leading with results and started leading with the people in the room. This piece is an extension of that habit. I am not saying blockchain will fix all the problems of Bangladesh's combat sports. I am saying that for one specific problem — the problem of records, money and the audience's trust — which nobody has seriously tried to solve, a specific technology is now within reach. And when this technology arrives, it arrives at the moment of crisis, not the moment of celebration. The context needs to be understood. The structure of combat sports in Bangladesh has stood so far on three pillars — the services teams, the amateur federations, and a few irregular professional cards. The army, police, Ansars and BGB — these four forces have, in effect, kept boxing, judo and wushu alive. A job in a force means a regular salary, regular training, regular competition. The civilian clubs walk exactly the opposite path: no sponsor, no coach, no regular competition. So a fighter who wants to keep competing past nineteen faces two real paths — put on a uniform, or quit the sport. I never write this structure in the language of policy. I write it through the story of one person, who at nineteen realises that it is not his talent but his uniform that will keep him on the field. The reader then does the arithmetic on their own. Doing that arithmetic makes one thing clear: the problem of our combat sports is not a shortage of talent, it is a shortage of pathways. And a shortage of pathways means a shortage of documents — there is no central, verifiable record of who fought where, who they lost to, who they beat. This is precisely where blockchain becomes relevant. Let me briefly say what blockchain actually is, because many readers confuse it only with cryptocurrency. A blockchain is a digital ledger where once an entry is written it cannot be quietly erased. Each entry is mathematically tied to the previous entry. If anyone wants to change one entry, they have to change every entry after it, and to do that they need the agreement of most of the network's computers. So verifiability and immutability — these two things can be technically guaranteed here, rather than left to a promise. Cryptocurrency is one use of this ledger, but not the only use. In combat sports its uses are far closer to the ground. A fighter's professional record, a weigh-in certificate, a doping test result, an instalment of a sponsorship deal — these are all pieces of information that people argue over for years, and every time the argument is won by the side with more paper and more money. I am not saying this lightly. In May 2026 I travelled to Dhaka to cover 'The Ultimate Glory' card, the country's first major professional card. The main event was won by Sura Krishna Chakma of Rangamati. On that trip I got ninety minutes in the locker room — the taping, the prayer, the weigh-in in the hotel ballroom. I filed three pieces in thirty-six hours. Those ninety minutes taught me that access is a beat, not a favour. But the bigger lesson was different: nobody knew what anyone's record actually was. One manager showed me a record, another manager told me the exact opposite number. Both were confident. Both were not lying — because neither had central truth in hand. Here is the first and least-discussed role of blockchain: the veracity of records. If every fight result, every weigh-in, every doping test result is written into an immutable ledger, then no one has to rely on managers' memories. As a journalist I know that this one change would cut half my job. Because a large part of our work goes into verifying information that someone has distorted, deliberately or not. Think about the audience's side too. Twelve thousand people were watching a weigh-in live. What were they watching? They were watching a ritual whose numbers nobody was verifying for them. If that screen had carried a verifiable record — this fighter fought this opponent on this date, with this result — the audience's experience would change. They would not just be spectators, they would become witnesses. And becoming a witness is what keeps a sport alive over the long run. I am cautious about fan tokens. Many promoters see them as an easy source of money — issue a token in a fighter's name, tell the fans to buy, raise money. This works, but it is not combat sports, it is gambling. I rather think about the reverse use: if a fight or a gym membership exists as a token, then the members themselves can decide who fights on the next card, which club gets how much money. This is democracy on a small scale, and a risk on a large scale. But in a place like ours, where the distance between audience and fighter is vast, this kind of connection has value. An even more grounded use is the fighter's dues. Here it still happens that a fight purse is held up for months, and the fighter goes door to door. A smart contract — a contract that releases money by itself once conditions are met — does not solve the whole problem, but it can solve a part. Say a contract states that if the fighter passes the weigh-in and finishes the fight, his share moves automatically to his wallet. Then nobody sitting in the middle can hold it back. One thing must be said clearly here, because I do not want to be overly optimistic. A smart contract releases money when conditions are met, but who sets the condition, whether that condition is fair, and who proves the condition was met — the answers to these three questions are not inside the technology, they are inside power. The technology does one thing: it reduces the opportunity for a middleman to betray trust. That is not small, but it is not everything either. Thinking about doping tests and weigh-in transparency reveals another possibility for blockchain. Our reality now is that doping test results are often secret, and nobody knows who has been tested how many times, who has failed how many times. If every test were written into a record — not just the result but the date of the test and the name of the body — then a fighter's cleanliness would become beyond question. The clean one could prove it. The unclean one could not hide it. On betting and the data market I remain ambivalent. It is true that if fight results are verifiable, the scope for rigging the betting market shrinks. But the same technology can pull audiences into betting faster, and in our society a large share of combat-sports fans are young. I do not want a sport's technological advance to drown its fans in debt. So I support transparency of information, but I do not encourage betting. There is a difference between the two, and that difference is the writer's responsibility. Sponsorship transparency is another big area. The big problem of our combat sports is that nobody knows where the money comes from and where it goes. A card is organised, fighters get a pittance, the promoter says it ran at a loss, and there is no accounting anywhere. If every expense and every income of a card were in a verifiable ledger, then 'it ran at a loss' could no longer be an excuse; it would be a number. And numbers can be argued with; excuses cannot. Now I come to the place where blockchain does not actually touch our real problem. Blockchain does not solve the problem of trust; it manages the absence of trust. If the core problem among fighters, coaches, managers and federations is arbitrariness — that nobody listens to anybody, that nobody is accountable to anybody — then technology will only make the arbitrariness more efficient. It is true that with a verifiable ledger a dishonest manager cannot steal. But if a dishonest federation chief decides that a fighter cannot compete for three months, that decision will be written clearly in the ledger, and it will stand as evidence of injustice, not prevention of it. So my contrarian judgment is this: in our combat sports the big impact of blockchain will be on records, money and the audience's trust, but it will work only when it comes with a real structure of accountability. Technology is a tool. A tool does not make anyone honest by itself; a tool only strengthens the honest and limits the dishonest. I say this as someone who, in November 2026, covered Dhaka's first professional boxing night from three thousand four hundred kilometres away, through eleven phone calls. That night there was no audience in the stadium, but there was a promoter, two cornermen, four fighters, four fans. I wrote their words, because I could not see the fight. I learned to quote the audience before the officials. A closed gym is a bigger story than a closed stadium. That Al Quoz gym was shut for fourteen weeks, then twenty-two members started training in a car park. There was no blockchain there; there was one heavy bag and a lost membership list. I think, if that list had been in a verifiable ledger, then perhaps after the gym shut, its members' history would not have been lost. Because here clubs close, but their members' fighting history is written nowhere. Here I want to raise a big risk that many avoid. Blockchain technology will arrive in our country by two routes — either through a foreign promoter or technology company, or through a state or semi-state body. In the first route the fighter's data goes into foreign business hands; in the second it goes into the state's hands. Both are risks for the fighter, unless his consent and his stake are secured. The ledger that keeps his fighting history should also give him its profit. Let me return to the audience's notebook. Twelve thousand views and forty chairs — the whole future of our sport is hidden between these two numbers. I do not want us to write these two numbers only in marketing language — I no longer write the sentence 'the sport is growing.' I write that the audience moved and the institutions did not. The audience is now on the phone; the institution is still in the chair. If blockchain does anything, it can pull the audience back into the room, give them a role beyond the screen. That is the role of witness, of investor, of stakeholder. On youth development I have an old opinion, and it is relevant here. Here a young talent, whose body is not yet finished, is pushed too quickly into big fights. Because promoters need a new name, and a new name is easiest to find young. Blockchain does not solve this problem; it may even bring a danger: if a fighter's record is always visible, then everyone will start calculating his age and his number of fights, and promoters will shout louder, 'Look, so many fights at only twenty!' If the number is verifiable, is that good, or will it burn a young body faster? My answer is that technology does not give absolution; it increases responsibility. If a record is verifiable, then once we know how many times a fighter has fought, we must ask — should he have? We must ask that question; technology will not. I have another opinion that is less discussed. When a lucky small team beats a giant — that story is beautiful, but it covers up the reality of financial inequality. It is the same in combat sports. When a village boy beats a boy from a big city club, we write the story, but we do not write that the village boy had no coach, no doctor, no sponsor behind him. If blockchain makes sponsorship information transparent, we will see which club gets how much money and which club gets nothing. Then the story 'the small team beat the big team' changes into 'how does a team that is given no money fight.' Now let me speak of our inheritance, because this is the place where blockchain can do something entirely different. Boli Khela in Chittagong, Lathi Khela in the villages, and Butthan — the one form Bangladesh can call its own. These three have never been written into any central ledger. When an old boli khela wrestler passes away, his lineage and his history of victories pass away too. If these traditions were written into a verifiable ledger — who beat whom, in which village, at which fair — that would not just be preservation, it would be proof. Proof that we had our own fighting tradition before we imported Japanese or Chinese coaches. I once wrote in a piece that in 2026 professional boxing arrived in our country as a business, not as a sport. Many people mourned then. I wrote that day that perhaps this was what was needed. Because for a business to survive it must clean up its accounts. Blockchain can be a tool for cleaning up that business's accounts. It will not glorify the sport, but it can keep the sport alive. Let me now state the central claim of this piece briefly, so the reader is not confused. I am not saying blockchain will resolve the crisis of Bangladesh's combat sports. I am saying that our combat sports have three specific pains — the veracity of records, the transparency of money, and the audience's trust. Each of these three now has a technological solution. But that solution will work only when it comes with a structure of accountability, the fighter's stake, and the audience's role. I am writing this from Colombo, and I want to be honest: my current reporting is partly remote, partly from correspondence and old notes. The fans in my group — those three thousand one hundred Bangladeshi combat-sports followers — still tell me after every card what happened in the room and what was shown on the screen. I write their words before the officials' words, because I learned this in 2026, when I could not see the fight. Before I finish, let me raise one question. We are talking about the technology of combat sports, but are we ready if that technology turns its gaze on our own ledger? If every fight, every taka, every decision becomes verifiable, will it not be revealed that we ourselves caused our biggest losses — inefficient federations, ad hoc committees, teams hand-picked by the National Sports Council, and sponsorship money all going to cricket? Technology cannot hide this truth; technology strengthens it. That day in that ballroom, standing between forty chairs and twelve thousand screens, I understood something that still sits in my drafts. The fight happens inside the ring, but the fight survives outside the ring — in the audience's notebook, in the fighter's contract, and in that truth which no one can change. I went to Karama for the match and left with the crowd. This time I am going to a card with a verifiable ledger, and I want to see whether the room fills up.