Does your ZED RUN horse have a perfect breeding mate?

Quick primer: ZED RUN is a virtual horse racing game/ecosystem/community built on the blockchain using NFTs where you can buy, sell, breed, and race horses. If you aren’t familiar with ZED, you can read up on it, watch some coverage, or just jump in!

A horse’s digital DNA ultimately determines how well a horse performs in races. Some people race for fun, some to try to win money. Some race to build up a horse’s profile in order to swap or sell it. Some people hold unraced horses to speculate that the broader value of ZED will continue to rise as it has over the last two years. And finally, some people breed in order to make money from stud fees or from selling offspring or from racing offspring. Got all that?

Here’s the deal. Great racers (say those that pull odds under 10 or win more than 15% of the time) are really rare. And if you race a horse and it doesn’t perform well then its value drops and earns the affectionate term of donkey.

But it turns out that even donkeys may have hidden value.

Let me explain. Let’s look at Moon Chaser — a Z1 Nakamoto Stallion (super rare and expensive!) who unfortunately has a terrible affinity for finishing 4th and gets mediocre odds when he races. Moon Chaser can, however, earn you some money in the stud farm by producing 3 offspring per month.

There is no prize money money for 4th place.

Here’s a tip: check in on that second generation to see how they are doing because as ZED evolves and grows many believe that breeding and bloodlines will be critical elements to the game. When you breed horses, the owner supplying the female gets the offspring. Often, those are sold quickly.

Recently, Moon Chaser had an offspring with Beep Beep named Good Bad Ugly, a colt named after a Clint Eastwood movie. Both parents have Coyote Brown coats but GBU is Field Drab. He was sold to Arbitrage Racing for (2.5 ETH) who saw racing promise.

And in a strange twist, GBU is one hell of a racer.

Good Bad Ugly has already won over 2 ETH (over $5k exchange rate 8/4/21)

Strange because his mom is not a genesis horse (just a ZEDRANK™ COMMON) and is a terrible racer, worse than Moon Chaser!

So, can two donkeys produce great racers?

Moon Chaser got together again for the next breeding cycle. In keeping with the Clint Eastwood theme bred another colt named High Plains Drifter (this time Taupe coat color).

Racing in Rome, Italy (in the ZED RUN metaverse!) on July 23, 2021, HPD entered his Griffin race and pulled 4.45 odds in a 2400m. HPD then proceeded to win by a country mile. In fact, his time was a faster 2400m time than his accomplished brother GBU has ever run.

So, two offspring from the same pair of donkeys. One with Griffin 5.5 odds and one with 4.45!

The next step was to comb the data and find out if this is happening with other pairs. There have been a lot of horses bred — roughly 40,000 and counting. I wanted to know how many breeding pairs had produced more than one offspring with stellar Griffin odds below 6.

The answer as of now is just 20. And of those 20, only 6 breeding pairs resemble the magic of Moon Chaser and Beep Beep.

Curious about the others? How about Striker and Yokozuna? They are 3 for 3, all with sub-6 Griffins and all look like great horses.

You want to get OG, look at Zeus and Unlucky Break who’ve bred Power and Degenerate.

And then another pair of donkeys also turned up. Legendary horses Earthquake and Robb Stark both have average 25 odds but have Toshiro and T’Challah as offspring.

So, a few takeaways from this excursion!

1. Donkeys may have a ton of hidden value for breeding. From a game perspective this makes sense.
2. Finding that value is challenging. Breeding on ZED RUN right now has a lot of friction. It is difficult to connect with other stable owners and hard to time breeding. This limits how many experiments are happening around breeding pairs. With ZED RUN sunsetting their odds data, quickly assessing offspring will be a thing of the past.
3. To date, true breeding pairs with some special digital DNA match are really really rare! We found just 20 instances of siblings with sub-6 griffin odds. And only 6 instances where further racing with at least one sibling confirming a proven racing track record.

Don’t give up on those donkeys! Maybe someday like Moon Chaser, you’ll find your Beep Beep. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

Thanks for reading. We hope to incorporate breeding pairs into our ZED RANKS service in the near future.

SIDE NOTE: Moon Chaser and Beep Beep are going to mate again each breeding cycle. If you are interested in reserving an offspring, send a DM to @narendra on Twitter.