![]() That means collecting entry fees, and perhaps sponsorship money. Right now, users make money from winning races, from breeding horses, and selling them.Īlso in the works is a real-estate angle: Users will be able to buy, develop, and manage their own racetracks. “We are researching and investigating and working with some of the brightest minds to see how to get to wagering.” “It’s definitely a feature request from our community,” Salha said. states are legalizing sports betting, and Virtually Human Studio is keen to capitalize on wagering to grow the game. What could significantly elevate interest in the game is the ability for users to gamble on the virtual races, and Zed Run’s developers say that’s in the works. “We are really going after a new demo of horse racing-enthusiasts,” Salha said. That’s the young (and young-ish) tech-savvy audience also into Discord, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and other streaming content services that Zed Run wants to capture, Salha said. Many of those buyers are Millennials and Gen Z. Baseball card maker Topps also is now pushing its cards as NFTs, selling $7.5 million worth since April 20. More than $550 million worth of NBA Top Shot highlights have sold via direct and second-market sales since October. Zed Run is enjoying the NFT popularity triggered by NBA Top Shot, the trading card-like NFT collectible of NBA-licensed video highlights. Whether it has the legs to endure through the craze remains to be seen. In Zed Run, a user can buy, breed, race and sell horses. Users are running about 1,500 races a day, and each race and each horse has an actual human behind the ownership of that horse. ![]() The game currently has 30,000 to 40,000 users across stable ownership and its Discord community, Salha said. To further goose that potential utility, Virtually Human Studio is working on new elements to keep users coming back, and to lure in new ones, said Rob Salha, the company’s co-founder and COO, in a recent video call with The Athletic from Australia. And utility is one way to survive in a crowded space largely dominated by digital collectibles that exist mainly to be flipped for profit. Gamification of NFTs is one way to give them utility, which is the usefulness and enjoyment that people get from something. But unlike most NFTs, the Zed Run horses can be bred (which is a buy-sell touchpoint for users) to create new ones, and like their real-world equine counterparts, each NFT horse has digital attributes that affect its racing. ![]() Zed Run’s horses are digital and live on your phone or computer rather than flesh and blood in a stable, and they exist as authenticated data on the Ethereum blockchain network. (For a quick primer on NFTs, blockchain, and crypto, click here and scroll down.) It’s still in public beta testing but has picked up users and media attention in recent months in the wake of NFT-based NBA Top Shot collectibles that exploded on the scene this year. Sydney-based Virtually Human Studio a couple of years ago developed and launched an NFT horse game called Zed Run. One Australian technology company offers a digital way to get into horse racing, and it could represent a formula for longevity in the burgeoning non-fungible token craze. The costs of buying, breeding and maintaining a racehorse, and entering it in the world’s most famous race, easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And TV is how most horseracing fans enjoy the sport, which has a towering barrier to entry because of the money involved. ![]()
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