What is Zed Run? Jack Settleman Explains

A few weeks ago, I blogged about "utility" in NFTs and why I think it is one of the most important words in the community. That blog primarily focused on digital horses in the NFT space, using zed.run as an example, but I think we should spend some more time explaining what the website actually is. 

Zed is a digital horse racing platform, using Ethereum as the currency for entry and prize money. The races are streamed online and the horses are owned by other users, who can set their own resell price. It is the closest thing to racing available right now. 

To buy a horse directly from Zed, you needed to be the first to the drop, but now you can buy from other users. Right now, there is no consistent drop schedule, so the other option would be to go to matic.opensea.io and purchase any of the items on the secondary marketplace.

Breeding is the second facet of the platform. I’ve gone from three horses to six horses during the last breeding period. 

If you have a male horse (stud or stallion) you can put them in the breeding farm. The better your horse is, the higher price you can charge. You could charge, say, $200 (or whatever you choose) to breed with your horse, but the female horse keeps the horse. 

Coat color matters. Lineage matters. All the small nuances of horse racing are involved. For the racing side of the site, both the distance and track quality matter. 

Zed has a community blog and the unofficial editorial magazine, Zed Gazette, is super awesome. They also have a discord, which can be found on their twitter; the community is pretty strong there.

In the future:

• They’ve talked about building new tracks. 

• Producing more content from the races 

• Getting announcers 

• Buying a race track (owning the sponsorships)

• Forming a relationship with Atari 

I really think Zed is one of the best ways for newcomers to the NFT space to truly understand what the movement is about. Zed’s site comes with a lot of utility and I hope people can see how a lot of the small nuances in racing are included in their program.