Chris Laurent, a co-founder of Zed Run, explains to Decrypt how their virtual horse-racing game has swept the crypto community off its feet. So what is Zed Run? How did Zed Run become so famous in NFT? Let’s see the reasons behind it.
What is Zed Run?
Zed Run is a non-fungible token-based online horse racing game (NFTs).
NFTs are used to symbolize the virtual horses that players can purchase, breed, and race.
It all started with a poster in an Australian Chinese restaurant. Chris Laurent, a co-founder of Virtually Human Studio in Sydney and the brains behind the NFT horse-racing game Zed Run, was picking up dinner one evening in late 2017 when he noticed a sign for a nearby stud farm on the wall. For a cost of $15,000 Australian dollars, it provided a stallion for breeding.
When Laurent, a horse racing aficionado working as a consultant for an Australian bookmaker at the time, examined the billboard more closely, he saw a caption that indicated this specific horse could reproduce up to 200 times per year.
Around that time, the Ethereum blockchain-based digital trading game CryptoKitties had also gained popularity. Although Laurent had initially written it off as "kind of silly," seeing this poster made him realize that a breeding system similar to that of CryptoKitties could be used to democratize racehorse ownership and share more of the profits with average bettors.
The non-fungible token (NFT), a crypto asset that may be connected to digital content and is provably unique, is the foundation of Zed Run. Images, videos, music, or, in the case of Zed Run, a virtual horse, can all be included as content.
How did Zed Run get famous?
Since the game's racing and breeding elements hadn't yet been released, Laurent and co-founder Rob Salha initially found it hard to think that anyone would be prepared to purchase their non-fungible gee-gees. However, within a few weeks, horses purchased from Zed for $80 were selling for as much as $10,000. The two realized they were onto something at that point.
In contrast to the real thing, Zed Run races take place on a floating track that traverses a retro-futuristic landscape in the style of Tron. With an algorithm that chooses the winner from among thousands of potential outcomes, each race is decided purely by the natural abilities of the dozen participating horses.
Laurent is also anxious to reassure individuals who believe they have already missed the Zed boat that it is still early in the process. The game is still listed as being in beta even though only around half of the 38,000 Genesis horses have been released so far.
