Ujitsu has taken a notable step toward modernizing how achievements are recorded in jiu-jitsu, announcing an integration with ADI Chain that will allow belt promotions to be verified on-chain. For a sport that has grown rapidly across countries, academies, and competition scenes, the move aims to solve a problem that has quietly existed for years: there has never really been a unified way to verify belt promotions in a consistent and trustworthy manner.
In jiu-jitsu, a belt promotion is a major milestone. It reflects time, discipline, progress, and the trust of a coach. But while the significance of the promotion is clear, the record of it is often far less secure. In many cases, athlete histories are kept inside individual gyms or scattered across different platforms. That can make them hard to confirm later, especially if an athlete moves to another academy, travels abroad, or loses access to older records. Ujitsu says its new integration is meant to change that by making verified promotions permanent and independently checkable.
The process itself is straightforward. When a coach confirms a belt promotion inside the Ujitsu app, that record is written on-chain through ADI’s infrastructure. Once it is recorded, it becomes immutable, meaning it cannot be edited or removed. The platform is not trying to decide who deserves a belt. That responsibility stays exactly where it has always been, between the athlete and the coach. What the technology does is preserve the decision once it has been made and verified.
For athletes, this means they will be able to see their verified promotion records directly inside the app, along with coach approval and blockchain-backed confirmation tied to an on-chain transaction. For coaches and academies, it creates a more transparent and durable history of athlete progress. In practical terms, that could make it easier to validate records across the broader jiu-jitsu community, where athletes often train, compete, and relocate across different regions and organizations.
“An athlete training in Abu Dhabi, São Paulo, or Tokyo had no reliable way to prove their rank across academies. Together with Ujitsu, we tackled that by making belt promotions permanent, portable records on ADI Chain’s infrastructure,” said Andrey Lazorenko, CEO of ADI Foundation.
Merdan Gurbanov, founder of Ujitsu, said, “Belt promotions are deeply meaningful in jiu-jitsu, but until now there has been no consistent way to preserve and verify them over time. With this integration, we are ensuring that achievements remain intact, transparent, and verifiable anywhere in the world.”
Connecting the Sporting World
Ujitsu chose ADI Chain because of its focus on data integrity, compliance, and institutional-grade infrastructure. Those qualities matter for records that are supposed to last for years and remain reliable across jurisdictions. ADI Chain is the first institutional Layer 2 blockchain for stablecoins and real-world assets in the MENA region, and it is already positioned as settlement infrastructure for a dirham-backed stablecoin initiative tied to IHC and FAB, with licensing from the UAE Central Bank.
The network says it operates on three main pillars: compliance, efficiency, and security. The integration also highlights the UAE’s growing role in blockchain infrastructure and its use beyond financial applications. Ujitsu itself is a UAE-founded technology company that serves the global jiu-jitsu community by connecting athletes, coaches, and academies.
Its platform gives athletes tools to track their training progress and manage their records, while also offering academies and coaches a full CRM system to handle athlete management, verify achievements, and simplify operations. Looking ahead, Ujitsu says the integration could support more than just belt promotions.
It may eventually help establish verified competition records, digital athlete identities, and a broader infrastructure for managing athlete data across the sport. That could become increasingly important as jiu-jitsu continues to expand internationally and as athletes and academies look for records that can travel with them. For now, the partnership between Ujitsu and ADI Chain points to a simple but meaningful idea: in a sport built on discipline, progress, and earned recognition, those achievements should not disappear with time.
