Ethereum NFT Horse Racing Game ‘Zed Run’ Reborn on Base as ‘Zed Champions’

After winding down its Zed Run digital horse racing game on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, Virtually Human Studios is relaunching a new, reimagined version called Zed Champions on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network created by Coinbase. 

The platform’s public launch is set to take place Monday evening at 8pm ET. Like the previous version of Zed, users will be able to race and breed digital horses, but with a few twists. 

In Zed Champions, horses will race automatically, dynamically matching with other horses of similar skill levels, removing the need to manually enter races—a requirement in the first installment.

“Zed Champions is the next evolution of our platform,” said VHS CEO Nir Efrat, in a statement. “We’ve built a system where skill and strategy drive the outcome, and both casual fans and seasoned players have reasons to keep coming back.”

Additionally, the new game will have a fundamental focus on the ecosystem’s Ethereum-based ZED token, which will be utilized to enter races, breed horses, and buy augments or power-ups. 

Each of the 4,320 horses in Zed Champions holds an internal balance of ZED tokens based on its breeding price and race performance, with a percentage of tokens then risked each time a horse enters a race. 

A horse’s internal ZED token balance then grows or shrinks depending on its performance on the track. Based on its balance, users can then make the strategic decision to retire their horses, cashing out the ZED tokens earned in the process. In some cases, if a horse’s ZED token balance gets too low, it may be forced into retirement, according to the game’s website.

The company’s digital horse racing game was an industry leader for a time while acting as an onboarding tool for the 2021 NFT bull run, eventually landing collaborations with Budweiser and Stella Artois. That year, Virtually Human Studios raised $20 million dollars from TCG Capital Management and Andreeseen Horowitz.

Throughout 2022, the game routinely registered millions of dollars in secondary trading volume on a monthly basis according to CryptoSlam, and some horses traded for hundreds of thousands of dollars during the game’s peak. 

But as NFT interest waned, so too did interest in Zed Run. The original game was shut down on February 28, and trading volume for the NFTs plunged thereafter—from about $28,000 worth in February to only $627 worth in March, per data from CryptoSlam. The original Zed Run NFTs start at a price of about $0.20 on major marketplace OpenSea.

Zed Run horse NFTs on Polygon are still tradeable and owned by players of VHS’s first digital horse racing game, but according to the Zed Champions website, none of the horse NFTs will carry over into the new game on Base.

However, Zed Run players who earned badges before that game’s shutdown were rewarded with race and breeding horses for Zed Champions, per a January blog post.

“Zed Champions offers a clean slate. Everyone starts fresh,” Efrat told Decrypt. “Legacy players were offered an opportunity to win rewards based on engagement and ownership to onboard into the new game. Returning users should be excited. It’s a new era of Zed Run, under new leadership, we moved to Base, and leveraged the learnings from past mistakes to create a sustainable model for longevity and success.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward