Cardano goes on-chain with criminal evidence tracking for police in India’s most populous state

Cardano (ADA) is expanding its real-world utility after police in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, began using the blockchain to track forensic evidence in active criminal cases.

The Cardano Foundation announced the deployment on Monday, revealing that every evidence scan and laboratory result is stored on-chain to strengthen record integrity during investigations.

Notably, TrivolveTech developed the Forensic Management System (FMS) in collaboration with Quixy. The project uses Cardano as an underlying verification layer, allowing police personnel to continue working through a conventional application without directly interacting with blockchain infrastructure.

The system addresses a potential weakness in conventional forensic procedures, where a shared case number can expose evidence to interference as it moves between police officers and separate laboratories. TrivolveTech designed FMS to replace that common identifier with unique codes for individual evidence handlers, limiting the ability to link records across different stages of an investigation.

Moreover, evidence boxes carry secure QR codes that can only be read through the FMS application. Each scan creates a record associated with the responsible handler, while cryptographic hashes are anchored to Cardano. These hashes function as digital fingerprints, allowing investigators to identify changes to recorded information during subsequent verification.

“Police evidence handling depends on trust between departments that are deliberately kept separate,” TrivolveTech founder and CEO Rahul Konudula said. “Each handler now works from an identifier meaningful only to their own step, and every scan becomes a permanent record on Cardano,” he added.

However, the system cannot confirm that evidence was collected properly or prevent physical tampering. Its value lies in the attributable digital trail it creates, which can show how evidence was handled and whether its records have been changed.

The Uttar Pradesh deployment adds to Cardano’s growing list of applications beyond cryptocurrency transactions. Last Wednesday, the Cardano Foundation reported that more than 100,000 farms in India had been registered on the blockchain through an agricultural initiative associated with the Syngenta Foundation. The project aims to make agricultural records more verifiable and reusable across lending, insurance, and government services.

Cardano is also pursuing education initiatives. The next day, the foundation announced that Cardano Academy would contribute a session on Cardano fundamentals and its extended unspent transaction output model to the University of Nicosia’s online Blockchain and Digital Assets course.

That said, Cardano is not the only blockchain network being used to secure official records. In Kenya, the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) recently launched a blockchain-based credential verification system using Avalanche, with more than 30 million academic records reported to have been moved onto the network.

The initiative aims to help employers, universities, and other institutions verify academic credentials while making fraudulent certificates easier to identify.