A look at Zed Run, a digital horse racing platform where users breed, race, and trade NFT horses, with some digital steeds and stables selling for six figures — Horse racing meet NFT mania on Zed Run, a digital platform where some top steeds are fetching six-figure sums.
There is a buzz in the crypto community about digital horses
Currently, some of the top horses are fetching six-figure sums on Zed Run, a digital platform where horse racing meets NFT mania.
This weekend, there are many stakes races taking place in the equestrian world, but the Kentucky Derby is certainly the most well-known of them.
There are several such events that take place every hour on Zed Run, a digital horse racing platform, seven days a week, and several of them occur every hour. It costs a modest amount to enter a horse for a race. Owners usually pay between $2 and $15 for their horses to compete against others for cash prizes.
This online race is based on NFTs, which are nonfungible tokens, and their existence is solely based on digital assets, which are considered nonfungible tokens. The carrots you feed them can’t be handled by hand, so you can’t pet them or pet them. There can’t be a mint julep in the stands as they sprint past you while you sip on a mint julep.
Zed Run’s creators describe each digital horse as a form of a “breathing NFT” because unlike the vast majority of NFTs, these digital horses are not static images or videos. They are living creatures that can be accessed through a web of playback animations.
There is an expression that says a breathing NFT is one with its own unique DNA to it. That statement was attributed to Roman Tirone, who is the head of partnerships at Virtually Human, the Australian studio responsible for Zed Run. There is a bloodline, a life force, a sense of self-awareness, and it can breed. A Zed Run NFT horse is not like any other horse; it races, it has genes it passes on, and it lives on an algorithm which makes it unique. (Yep, owners can breed NFT horses in Zed Run’s “stud farm.”).
In recent years, more and more people – mostly crypto enthusiasts – have been flocking to Zed Run’s platform, buying up the digital horses that arrive as limited-edition drops in limited quantities. Some of the digital horses have even sold for more than live horses. A player in the game sold a stable full of digital racehorses for an amount of $252,000. For a single racehorse, another owner received $125,000. It has been reported that more than 11,000 digital horses have been sold on this platform so far.
The 48 of the devices were purchased by Alex Taub, the founder of a tech start-up based in Miami, Florida. Mr. Taub, 33, said that most of the NFTs are bought and sold, and that would be how most of the NFTs make money. By racing or breeding your NFTs with Zed, you can earn money from your NFTs in an easy and fast way.
His stable is still growing and he has a lot to offer. Earlier this month, his 5-year-old daughter was given the opportunity to breed a digital horse. Upon returning from school, he told me that she wanted to race it when she got home. Gemstone was the name she gave to her horse, and Gemstone had two children named Rainbows and Sparkles after the horse.”
Normally, a race has a 12-horse limit, and the lineups of those horses are determined according to the qualities of each horse and his past performances. As a part of the site’s algorithm, 10,000 random outcomes are ran and one of them is chosen as the one to be used as the condition for the race.
On Zed Run’s Twitch channel as well as the company’s website, the races take place 24 hours a day and are streamed live. Besides its Discord server, Zed Run also allows people to track race results, trade tips, and exchange third-party tools for analyzing data via its Discord server. In addition to livestreaming their own races, users can also repackage the clips for use on YouTube and Twitch.
The digital horses are becoming mini influencers in their own ecosystems to a certain extent,” stated Yair Altmark, a venture capitalist in New York who has invested over $300,000 in digital horses over the past year. As a result, horses that do well in these streams and get exposure on the Discord server are making themselves known in the industry.”
He anticipates that he will be able to recoup most of his money. A buy-in race can cost anywhere from a few dollars to around $50. If you want to enter a horse in a race, you can race your horse an unlimited number of times, but it would not surprise me if some of these horses were traded for $1 million in a couple of months, Mr. Altmark, 23, said. It is possible to enter a buy-in race for anywhere from a few dollars to around $50.
As a result of Chris Laurent, Rob Salha, Geoff Wellman and Chris Ebeling coming together in 2018, Zed Run was founded. In their opinion, horse racing was a fertile ground for innovation in the industry. According to Mr. Laurent, it is one of the oldest sports in the world, having remained largely unchanged since the dawn of time.
There can be a prohibitive cost associated with owning and racing real horses. However, according to Drew Austin Greenfeld, 36, an investor in New York who specializes in horse racing, there is a lower barrier to entry for NFT horse racing. According to him, there is a difference between cheap horses and premium horses.