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The Based Builders Show – hosted by @toady_hawk and @JackWyldes
Recorded: April 29, 2025 Duration: 0:51:24Space Recording
Short Summary
Zed Champions Launches on Base: A New Era for Digital Horse Racing with Enhanced User Engagement and Earning Potential. The team behind Zed Champions is set to revolutionize the digital horse racing landscape with a new app that emphasizes user strategy and skill, alongside exciting earning opportunities through Zed tokens.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Cody and Jack Wilde in here.
Apologies. Tchuss ! Thank you. you
pixel ponies on the starting line tonight Beyond hoops, they shine under the racetrack light.
Click the screen, it's time to make your mistake.
Virtual dust flies where legends will awake.
We're all in perfect places, and it's gonna blow your mind.
All the rhythm, freedom, running through the mid-est line.
Crystal wins the howling, call it Jada Lovecore skill.
On the face of the stage, dancing dream for the thrill.
Coding numbers, yeah, they're our lucky charm.
Riding data waves, no stables, no barn.
Infinite landscapes in a decent old dream.
Galloping into the cloud, hear the crowd scream.
We're on the public places. Take a bow your mind. Oh wow, Jack.
Doesn't that just bring you back to the summer of 2003 when that song came out?
Such a banger.
Yeah, this is why I'm not scared of AI.
Yeah.
What is up, guys?
Just wanted to give some time for people to come in the room.
Stop with the thumbs down.
It's all good fun fun here we are here for
the base to build a show episode two sorry for the technical difficulties has a little bit of
technical difficulties getting the space up and running but we're here that's the important thing
we're here and we are here to chat about uh some awesome builders building on base we've got
ryan trust here who's going to talk to us in great detail about Zed Champions.
Excited for that.
But before we dive in to all that, well, first of all,
we're going to hand the reins over to Mr. Toki here from base
to give you a little message from base, a little disclaimer.
And I'm going to shoot the shit here with Jack for a little bit,
and then we'll get in with our guest.
So, Toki, over to you.
Cheers, cheers.
GM, everyone, apologies for the day-loving start.
Had some technical difficulties, like Tony stated, but thanks for tuning in with us today.
Hope everyone who might be traveling to Farcon has safe travels and a great time.
Super excited to hear from Zed Champions.
But quick disclaimer before we dive in.
Today's conversation is for informational educational purposes only.
Does not constitute investment or legal advice.
The views expressed are our own and do not represent base or coinbase nothing shared should be considered an
endorsement by us space or coinbase and that's it for my side passing it back over to toady and jack
to kick things off for us excited to hear from ryan and the champions thank you y'all i kind of feel
like this is like the space is equivalent of like on those uh the drug ads you know when they have
to give all the side effects at the very end
Yeah, those are great. I wish I could do that. It's so fast
Try try it
The show may include may include very based mustache very cool very based
That's right side effects from the basically it's so hard to do that. I can't speak that fast
My mouth doesn't work that way.
I think you could do it.
You just think you need to do a little,
a little prerecord.
We'll do,
maybe we'll do that for the next episode.
That's right.
A little prerecord.
Nice to see some familiar faces down there.
What's up,
Nabu?
What's up,
Goya?
Seeing lots of great people.
Dish was down there giving us a thumbs down.
Didn't like our AI slop intro.
That's okay,
Dish.
We take all criticism at face value uh but yeah nice to see
you guys all if you're here and you're a base builder you love base uh please give us a share
uh we had a little bit of technical difficulty so some people might uh have thought the space wasn't
happening or what have you so please give it a share so people know that we are here and we are
talking about base so they'll come in and join it, and we'll have more fun. Jack, what have you been working on?
What's your bass week been like?
Man, my bass week has been controlling a crash out and just trying my best not to explode.
No, I've been doing some cool stuff.
That's just a normal week.
Yeah, that's just me.
That's just me.
Every week thing is me battling my destruction um but i uh
i i actually did some really cool stuff this weekend i did some noun stuff um which is cool
and i went and shot a super smash tournament um and we're gonna be putting putting these videos
out um on chain and uh hopefully mint them and maybe it'll turn into a you know some sort of I don't know
short form it's it was really interesting I'd never been to a smash tournament the nouns
nouns esports team they run in a really tight ship it was awesome it was at the pro football
hall of fame they had smash going on you know a 25 year old game they had
it playing on the jumbotron noggles were everywhere people were hyped it was a really
cool experience and i'm glad that i went and did it that's cool that was close to home for you right
yeah it was not far at all so it was kind of worth it it was i mean it was kind of a crazy
long weekend because it was driving there and back each day and uh also daughter had her first soccer game they won um and son had four four solos in uh in jazz band so i had to do all
that as well and then drive back and forth but it was uh sounds like it sounds like winning
sounds like you're doing it was it was a it was a winning weekend it was a winning week
what about you man oh so we had something kind of big happen yet not we you so i gotta find out uh what's what'd
you do last week what's going on well we we did a little launch yesterday some of you may have
seen uh we're pre-launch i guess you could say for a new mini app uh on base on farcaster
called betterment so pretty excited about that uh give a follow over at betterment if you haven't
heard about it uh but yeah i I mean, it's pretty interesting.
Kind of just harnesses some degen energy to hopefully help creators get paid for their content on-chain.
That's sort of all I'll say about it.
I don't want to self-shill too, too much.
But we did a pre-save app yesterday on Firecaster, and the actual first game goes live today.
Who knows?
Maybe I'll even spill some alpha later on this space about exactly when or approximately when the first game will be.
The idea is basically it opens for two hours a day each day
and then essentially it's open until the prize pool for that day is gone.
You mint content from our featured creator that day,
you spin a wheel, and you may win up to 100 times back in rewards.
So pretty cool.
Excited about it.
It was a big launch yesterday. Stressful week, uh but nothing has broken yet so that's a good thing
uh yeah i had to i had to paint uh my my a room a new room for my sons and they couldn't decide
on a theme uh between jungle theme and space theme so in the end uh we're doing both uh so i spent half my weekend
also uh painting half a room extremely dark blue and half a room green nice to do a jungle space
theme a little mini freak out i thought you're gonna say so we decided better we're just gonna
turn their room into a better a betterment room we're going the dark the black and the neon purple
they're gonna love it they're gonna totally love it i don't know i don't know if it's a vibe for a two-year-old but it's a vibe
but yeah hey you know we are going to be speaking about you know like we're talking about better
right now but uh you don't have like uh you know ponies on better but the no you can't you can't
better on the ponies but you can can do that on Zed's Champions.
Excited to have our guest here today, Ryan.
Appreciate you joining us, especially on short notice.
Oh, well, good.
Nice to have you here.
I've heard you speaking about what you guys are building on a few other spaces,
like Quig Space a few weeks back.
Really exciting stuff.
Why don't you take a moment to introduce yourself to everybody who's listening in and hopefully
everyone who's listening back. Who is Ryan Trost and then we'll get into what you're building.
Yeah, yeah, sure. First of all, thanks so much for having me. I need that
song that played at the beginning. We're going to have to put that on the website somewhere. I think that that
should be our new intro.
So long as you're ready to complain about the slabs. Why is the token down? Oh yeah, the new intro so long as you're ready yeah yeah right to complain about the slot yeah why is it
why is the token down oh yeah the new intro song no no but uh yeah once again thanks so much for
having me uh my name's ryan trost i'm the chief of staff at uh virtually human studios we have
been working on zed champions uh for the last 16 months as a major transition from our previous
product zed run uh which was obviously one of the
biggest Web3 IPs of the 2021 cycle. I remember Zed Run. Zed Run's going back almost as far as
that banger from 2002 that we listened to. Yeah, right. They're both dinosaurs, right?
No, for sure. And I know that there will be a lot of people who obviously are listening who
have been longtime players, obviously transitioning over to the new game with us,
or maybe you're hearing about us for the first time genuinely since 2021.
So yeah, to reintroduce ourselves to the market, what we've put together here is basically
the end vision of what we really wanted to do and captivate from that 21 cycle, which
was the opportunity to create a horse that could give you what felt like life-changing
different types of opportunities, right?
People in 2021 who had those horses that were worth tons, people who had those horses who
were able to win races all day long, like repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, what really
helped Zed Run kind of catch lightning in that cycle.
We've bottled up that experience and really put it together in an automated, seamless
racing pool with a new auction-based breeding system.
So at the end of the day, we've created a much more streamlined version of our original game
that we're hoping is more accessible to the broader market.
We're obviously launching on base because we firmly believe that this is going to be the top of funnel
for this next big cycle that hopefully we're about to enter into.
It's probably surprising to some people, Ryan,
that you were even able to build an on-chain game on mainnet.
You know, like a lot of people don't remember how high fees were back then,
especially.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Building a game with no small fees.
We paid fees.
That's for sure.
Yeah, I mean, obviously we were on Polygon in the 21 cycle
and we paid our fair share of fees while over there.
But at the end of the day, you know, it's clear that there is something happening here on base that is being reflected in both underlying liquidity that's flooding into the market from all other chains.
And then also the stables that are, you know, being one propped up for global economies, right? And also just in general, how much is on the sidelines waiting for a captivating experience that can really recreate that thrill that really defined the 2021 cycle
and hopefully is what people are here on chain looking for from games.
That sounds good. Can you explain, maybe we'll start with the original game and sort of explain
the mechanics of how that works for anyone who never played it.
And then after that, you can maybe walk us through what's changed in the new version.
Yeah, great. So in the original game, it was basically a breeding game, right?
So you would pair together two horses, try to maximize whatever stat you were breeding for,
and then that would be reflected in your underlying career while you raced the horse. You got to select which distance you raced at, which different types
of entry fees and tournaments that you would qualify for. The main thing that we found was
along this path, what users enjoyed the most was the thrill of breeding the next best horse.
Having that first reveal moment where you said to yourself, oh, I have something here. It's time to
hold on to this and make my money's worth. That moment,
we've basically taken and defined in Zed Champions as the racing pool. In our new game,
instead of there being thousands of races to choose from per day, race is taking forever to
fill, constantly having to identify, oh, I can't race in this race because the best horse in the
game is there. There's no real skill-based matchmaking. We've identified all of those as being key problems with the core engagement loop
in our old game and have effectively redesigned everything from scratch in order to make this new
game a much better experience for what you're trying to accomplish, which is let's see if we
can get a horse to go parabolic. I'm playing Web3 games because I believe that there is
capturable value here that can eclipse what I can earn betting on, you know, DraftKings, playing on other different types of, you know, wagering apps.
Right. People bought NFTs because they believed that they were going to define the cycle.
They even made them their own brands. Right. Everything about them.
We had stables in Zed Run who became their stable.
They had social accounts for their stable. Their horses were famous, right?
We want to recreate that.
We're talking horse stables here, not like USGC stables.
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
I know.
New kind of stables.
I know stables are so hot right now, right?
Everybody wants to know that.
Yeah, we're really trying to capture that.
That might attract some investors, though.
They might come your way thinking stables are hot.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's a new SEO strategy from my marketing team listening.
It's perfect.
But so in the new game, the core loop is quite simple, right?
You come on, you start with a free breeding horse.
This is a soul bound horse.
Every new account gets one.
It lets you experience what it's like to own a horse, look at its base stats, understand what your objectives are from there, which are to go into the auction market and to try to breed a horse.
That is really the core experience.
Your job is to get into the racing pool.
Now, the racing pool is scarce.
There are only 4,320 horses in the racing pool at any given time.
given time. The way that we maintain this population, when a new horse is bred, a horse
leaves the racing pool, either by forced retirement or the owner retiring and saying,
I think my career is done. I feel like I've optimized my performance. Let's exit.
So there's like a pipeline, a pit pipeline straight to the glue factory?
Well, you got a pit stop. You got a pit stop enabled to breed yourself, right? So you breed their new horse.
New horse enters into the racing pool.
It races two times per day automatically.
We have scheduled rounds every single day.
There's no waiting for your races in terms of what do I enter?
Which tournament should I play?
Everything is fully automated 24-7.
There's a bigger reason for this that hopefully I'll be able to get into.
But for the core user experience as an owner of a horse, as a player, you really just get to sit
back and say, okay, for the next day, I have all of my races scheduled. I'm looking at all my
scheduled races and I'm just making decisions based on should I retire this horse? Should I
change my augments, which is something I'll get into in a little bit for when we kind of start
talking about how the horses actually work.
And then you choose to retire if that's the optimal strategy.
Now, while you're racing in the old game, we basically had entry fees. Right. You would look at an event. It would be let's call it a one thousand meter, you know, top three race.
Right. Where the top three horses win and you enter five for five dollars.
Right. We had so many options in terms of entry fees,
and there was always kind of like a collapse down to the lowest entry fee, right?
People just wanted to get in races and qualify for tournaments
where there was huge positive expected value overlay.
In the new game, when you breed your horse,
the cost that you outlay in the auction,
50% of that gets stored in the horse.
We've essentially kind
of tokenized our horses within our racing pool, where right now you then own a balance within that
horse. The horse is automatically racing from that balance. So instead of having to manage your own
pool of entry fees, we've basically automated that for you. And so not only do you have these
automated races where you get to
sit back, assess the field, make skillful decisions, but you also get to see paid racing scale up while
you experience the game. And then when you retire, you get paid out the remaining purse. And that's
like the core experience of the game. Breed, start with your balance, try to get your balance as high
as possible, as strategically as possible for as long as possible, retire,
and then you enter into breeding with that horse.
And that's where things, you know, kind of really start to expand.
So you've gamified it as like manager mode a lot more where you're not having
less manager mode, more breeder mode, where you're,
you're not constantly worried about the
joining the races and the little things that yeah the old game was probably missing i mean yeah the
old game was a full-time grind i mean i even my my i started as a player of zedron in 2021 and
i helped build a third-party tool that was eventually required by vhs and that was kind
of my pipeline into working here at the company. But as a player,
I mean, I raced somewhere over like 20,000 times and those are all manual entries. I never bought
it. I literally had sat there and clicked, clicked, clicked, clicked, clicked. We have players who
raced so many more. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You had a lot of evenings where you were like, sorry, honey,
I can't get my time. Got to enter into races. You know, I got to get into the tournament.
I had a horse called vanilla bean, which if you played the old game, you're probably laughing at me right now for even bringing her up.
But she was one of the best horses in the game.
One night I raced like, you know, before we turned fatigue on, I raced like 50 times in the $100 entries.
Right.
It was just an insane night.
But as the game kind of evolved, you know, it became more difficult to find that type of risk and that type of liquidity because there was no real modulation of it right like if you had a really good horse
you had to pay up to race and stomaching that is is not really for everybody right everybody has
their own individual risk profile and you get these huge range of profiles within a game that
scaled to the level that we did right such a popular ip that it had, you know, at 1.6,000 DAU and they were all extremely
high LTV, like paying so much money because, you know, it's at the peak at the top of the ETH cycle,
right? And the impact of that is that, you know, when those risk profiles mix, it's not really a
game of skill anymore. It's just like a resource management game. And the top stables just
dominated, right? Because they had the resources, they had all the scale. Now in the new game, because this racing pool is
basically a leaderboard in two senses, right? The first leaderboard is, if you go onto the website,
you'll see all of the horses that are ranked in terms of their stored balance, right? As horses
race, they win. When they get additional balance from winning,
that's basically the prize pool of the race.
They start to scale up.
As they scale up, you'll see them
at the top of the leaderboard.
You know, if you go to zedchampions.com,
you head over to the leaderboard,
you'll currently see the top value horse.
That horse could literally retire
and get paid out that amount.
So this is fully transparent.
You know exactly what that horse is currently worth. and it allows the market to start to make interpretations of what should
that horse be worth right so now we have like we're already seeing a huge amount of marketplace
liquidity uh for people trying to extrapolate out what these things are actually worth in 2021 this
was happening on like a huge scale where the market was not defined by real liquidity.
Like I have a great example. If everyone remembers like proof pass, I mean, and moon birds, I mean,
like proof pass one day went up from like 50 E to 150 E than like six sales. And I'm like,
it's not worth 150 E, right? Like, that's not really how that works. There needs to be underlying
liquidity in our game. The underlying liquidity, the foundation for these horses is literally the
value you can retire them for. So now we've solved that whole situation of there being massive
speculation gap between foundational value, which is the most dangerous thing to game economies.
And what obviously we found a pretty big significant portion of what happened to us,
you know, outside of ETH collapsing like 80%,
but we don't have to go there.
Yeah, we don't need the PTSD today.
I know, I know.
I see Naboo down there throwing a lot of emojis,
just came up on the stage.
Yeah, we love Naboo.
What's up, man?
Yo, BMBM, everyone.
So I was going into the elevator, so I think I missed part of the space,
but I saw you, Legends, on the panel, and I saw Ryan and talking about Zed.
Matt, I don't know how many of you guys are playing the game.
I'm constantly changing my setup for the CPU, my high volley.
That shit is crazy because
you know what I love about Zed?
You can go and watch the games,
the races that your horse
was participating in
and check and see how you can
change the setup of your CPU
or RAM to
customize it best for that horse
to get the...
I love the game.
Cool stuff.
Thank you, man.
No, it's, I'm really happy that you kind of created this natural segue into the augment system.
So another thing about the difference between Zed Run and Zed Champions,
in Zed Run, once you identified what your horse was,
there was literally not like shit else to do, right? You just click buttons and either made money or didn't over a large period of time, like a thousand races was in a horse's
career, right? There was no modulation to like what you could and couldn't do. Now in Zed Champions,
the biggest thing that we've changed is one, how breeding works and two, what you do after breeding
in between races. How do you actually impact and change the outcome of your
next race based on an underlying skillful decision? What we've created is a system called
augments. The way that horses work in Zed Champions, the race is always a thousand meters long.
Okay. And along that race, horses run at different speeds over time. You might have a horse who's a
fast starter. You might have a horse who's a fast finisher. You might have a horse who's a fast starter. You might have a horse who's
a fast finisher. You might have a horse who steadily speeds up throughout the race quite
consistently, right? While you're identifying what your horse runs, how it runs, just like you would
at a track. If you watched a horse run by, you'd be like, oh, look at that split. You know, it ran
real fast in the last 50 meters, right? That's super important information to me. We're trying to recreate that intuition through our game. And as you start to notice those things, you then are
revealed how augments work. Augments are essentially selective boosts on your horse at different
periods of time throughout the race, or if different conditional elements are met. For example,
let's say you're six meters behind the horse who's in front of you.
You might be able to attach an augment that during the race, if that condition is met,
it'll boost. This allows you to gain a competitive advantage over horses within the same race
that allows you to take one step further than just breeding. Because over time,
breeding will become this really high level competitive deep strategy game. I mean, you could breed five generations down, constantly combining these speed characteristics of horses,
and then looking to boost them with augments in a completely different and unique way.
So what Naboo was mentioning is basically each race, you can change your augments to potentially either adapt to the horses who are racing next to you,
or to change something that you had you know
previously thought was a good idea in an experiment from your last race let's say i had an augment that
was a fast finisher augment right it would give me a little bit of a boost in the last quarter of the
race if i played that augment and it didn't really provide me any level of advantage my odds didn't
get any better for the race i might say to to myself, let's make a change. So what players are doing are for every horse after every race, they're changing their augments,
experimenting with how they fire, and basically really making skillful decisions in a game
where that wasn't really an option for almost four years, even though we've done millions
in fees, millions in racing.
Now, for the first time, we can recreate that underlying
experience of how fun it is to race digital horses. But now you get to impact it with your
own skill and long-term strategy. And all the while, these horses are scaling up in value,
competing for more and more Zed token, storing more and more Zed token within the ecosystem
system as essentially like a TVL representing, you know, the underlying health of the economy.
as essentially like a TVL representing, you know, the underlying health of the economy.
And it's, it's all part of one big model and that's just Zed champions, right? So we are also
building a spectator product for this called Zed picks, but I will stop before I really dive into
that, you know, kind of just answer any questions on, on Zed champs from you guys. Well, I thought,
so I was actually thinking about this as we were
talking about earlier and this is something i thought about early on with said run um back in
the day uh what like eventually the meta solved right there's going to be kind of a de facto best
horse people are going to want to breed towards this like they think okay this is the style of
horse that's running best that's i'm guessing this is what it seems like in the game theory but now you're introducing a way to yeah to strategize and actually there's there's like user skill involved
now besides just breeding so that's pretty cool it was is the only other way to kind of combat
solve meta is is why the the retirement system is there just so you can kind of cycle through
it is it so powerful that
once you get the best horse, you said you had a horse that was like kind of the best horse back
in the day. Right. Right. Once is it, does it ever just get solved? You, so that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure. I mean, you know, it's kind of a multi-phased answer and,
and we're, you know, we look at game designers to solve this from a bunch of different places, right? You can kind of solve this from the underlying horse.
And how we've done that is horses have a trait called endurance. I'm probably going to change
this to like longevity because it kind of really represents aging. But that being said, it's
reflected in your star rarities. So this is kind of like the, you know, most people are familiar
in games, how you have like a one to five star rating, right? Five stars being the best. In our game, we define the underlying traits of the horses
for you. So you can kind of see that right away. There's obviously much more
under the surface, but from like a qualitative level, you'll be able to look and say, oh,
that's a four star horse, right? That's pretty good. If you look at its endurance and let's say
it has five star endurance, it's going to last really long in terms of its career. Now,
this is defined on like a per race level. At a certain point, horses will start to age and get
tired, right? They'll run a little bit slower on average. So not only are you having to selectively
manage how your balance is increasing, almost like you're playing a game of crash, like genuinely,
I don't know how many super degenerate gamblers are in the chat, but like you're playing crash you know you're watching the rocket go watching the rocket go and at a
certain point you got to jump before it blows up right in zed champions as your horses if you if
it's good and it's starting to break away you could reach these points where you know a horse
in the beta was at like 60x roi and another horse was down at like 30x roi and you win one race then
it's at like 50x.
And you're like, okay, these things are really like supernovas, right?
And that's like something I got to hold on to.
That's the one thing, the psychology of, you know, actually managing risk like that, right?
You know, that's a real part of crypto games, for sure.
While also combating the longevity.
Can you do like a Brian John do like a brian johnston
strategy where you can kind of like try to optimize for your horse's longevity yeah yeah
well you can do that through breeding right so there's no way to really change the the outcome
of your horse once it's defined so endurance is something that's defined you can't tell it to
sleep sleep more hours no no no no nope you got to run twice per day every day right 24 7 because we have
something that uh you know not only do traditional wagering markets lack but even some crypto games
lack which is constant market uptime for an event that scales in excitement every single day all
day long yeah real real horse races suffer from this down yeah i mean it's it's literally the
biggest impact to their market, right?
Everybody knows there's only really three times that you bet on horse racing,
unless, you know, you have a track nearby or, you know, you're a gambler and you're on your phone.
I mean, listen, I'm on DraftKings as much as the next guy, so I don't blame anybody.
But all of that being said, what people are really hungry for in terms of operators,
What people are really hungry for in terms of operators, in terms of where product market fits for games of skill and wagering on games of skill, there's a huge market for that.
We have races that run every 80 seconds, and they have markets made for them.
We're going to build this into Zed Picks.
It's going to be a full spectator app in the app store where you're basically be able to do with real money picks within the race, right? You pick two,
between two and four horses to get in the top half is kind of the first game that we'll offer,
you know, with plans to grow Zed Picks much larger, right? But at least for the MVP,
you come on, you watch a real Zed Champions race being run by real players with real horses that
they own. You pick two of the horses out of the gate, let's say, to get in the top half.
You watch that race, you put five bucks on it.
You win, you might win 15 bucks.
And this app will be available throughout the United States.
Just like anywhere you can find Fliff, basically, would be a great comparison.
And we're hoping to scale that product to, you know, hundreds of thousands
of players, right? So this is our real long term strategy to break us out of the crypto mold,
not because we feel like we're contained here, but because we feel like the space needs time to
grow. We need this cycle to develop. We feel like we've kind of put our chips on the table and said,
hey, we're building on base where we believe this next cultivation of major products is going to
start from. And along the way, we're protecting ourselves by building this much bigger spectator
loop on top of our game, because we believe there's a market for people who want to, you know,
have a spectator experience on horse racing. And not only that, but horse racing, that is
pretty sweet looking. I mean, one thing I've never forgotten in my life is in 2021, when I watched
my first Zed Run race, there's something powerful about this IP. It's been proven in the market.
We believe that resurging that IP into the market again in a really big way,
getting it into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people is achievable for us.
And we're going to build that app. And I already have it on my phone on test flight,
which is like an insane alpha to drop on this call.
I'm constantly kind of putting picks in on the sandbox environment and kind of seeing how it feels, how it plays.
It is really, really sick to be able to finally have this type of experience on a Web3 game that can scale.
And that's our big moment.
We think we're going to hit the market in a big way with that in the next couple of months.
I mean, this isn't a thing that's coming next year. I'm not bearing the lead. We're getting
really close on this. That's awesome. I think that's something that's interesting about horse
racing as a concept too, is that it's one of those sports that it does have interest on both sides.
You know, the people that are breeding the horses and the people that are just watching them race
are both, you know, presumably having a good time. And you don't really get that with any
other sort of gambling or any other
sports. It's kind of an interesting marriage.
And you know, the digital version,
you're not going to have PETA on your back the whole time.
They're probably just really supporting you.
Yeah. This is sustainable.
This is humane.
I wouldn't put it by some of the activists to be against AI horse racing
somehow.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I do have a question, a follow-up on something said earlier.
I think Navu mentioned changing system settings and stuff.
And what were they called again?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So basically the Augments, they're kind of gamified, right?
So the Augments have three different types.
augments have three different types. There's the CPU, there's the RAM, and then there's the hydraulics.
There's the CPU, there's the RAM, and then there's the hydraulics.
This is just like our first kind of attempt into starting to do a little bit of world building
around how the system can kind of create. In our mind, we see these horses as this kind of a
hybrid digital, you know, living AI type of thing, right? And how might you modulate something like
that that's kind of computerized? Well, our first thought is, let's just start with CPU, RAM,
hydraulics, you know, types of things that people can understand. And they look fun and cool, right? I think the artist is also something to be spoken about. And I'm super happy with my
team to be able to have gotten that done so quickly. We're really going to expand that system,
by the way, there's going to be rarities. Eventually, it'll be like an entire tradable
market. You'll be able to buy, sell, open packs,
and potentially get epic and rare augments.
And they might provide you another significant boost in the game.
And this will be an entire new core engagement loop,
especially as the racing loop starts to scale.
Over time, it's going to become more and more expensive
to get into the racing pool.
The game's kind of designed to cultivate almost like a league, right? Like we really see the way that we designed Zed Champions
to be that pinnacle of racing, literally on the blockchain. We want this to be the thing to watch.
Horses going as expensive as the players can really handle. This model doesn't have a top end,
right? We didn't say, oh, you know, if horses get to a certain level, they need to be forced or tired. The model is literally, if a player gets a really good horse,
tunes its augments perfectly, and holds on for the ride, and starts to really, really go
exponential, like we saw, you know, a shout out to Solaire Stables, one of our beta players,
who literally held the reins and watched this horse go exponential. And if someone can stomach that, the upside of this game is really unlimited.
It's up to the users to eventually retire, right?
And that's with the token at our current prices.
And we've seeded the economy in our game with 4% of the token stored within the horses.
And additionally, we're seeding another 6% in Resed,
which is a locked currency players can use for auctions.
All of this happened over the weekend.
It's been like a crazy lead up to launch, obviously, for us as well.
Haven't gone live last night with racing.
But our economy is ready to burst basically on Wednesday, right?
We're about to have a ton of activity, auctions, new horses spread.
There really has never been a better time, obviously, to jump in for anyone who's listening who might have be hearing about us for the first time but yeah i'm super excited for this week jack why am i picturing you having like a zoolander
moment where you're like the coins are in the yeah yeah yeah i definitely need to expand on that i
know yeah that's just you you know, that is me.
That's what I do.
I will say, Tross, somebody turned up your charisma points because you're getting me kind of pumped about this.
I like this.
It sounds a lot more fun. You've been augmented?
Yeah, you augmented?
What's going on here?
I think the sounds, yeah, this sounds more put together for sure than the, and just easier for somebody to get to.
What would be some suggestions for people out there who are listening
who might want to play this, you know, who joined Zed Champions?
Where would they want to start?
Yeah, for sure.
You know, I think there's two main sources of information
that I kind of would lead players to, right?
The first would be obviously help.zedchampions.com.
We've put together
a ton of material. We've had some professional videos made that are like intros and very quick
overlays of major systems within the game. I would definitely grind that, right? I would try to get
as much information as I can, but I would also feel super free to step into Discord. We have like
a really, really active Discord community. I mean, these people have been grinding our Discord for five years, right?
A lot of them, I swear I know from early 2021, I'm in there all the time.
Ian, our head of players, is in there all the time.
We have really created, even when they're spiteful or even when they're super angry at us for something,
at the end of the day, these players have really stuck with us for a very long time. And I think they're a great support system. We've also, you know, enlisted
the help of some other major players in the space, you know, shout out to Naboo and Quigs,
creating some really good content for us and really helping people kind of see, hey,
we understand that there might be a little bit of a learning curve getting into a digital horse
racing game on base. That is the resurgence of an IP you heard about in 2021 that you're really,
oh, I don't want to miss it this time, right?
Like, of course not.
So now there is a little bit of objectivity that you need to learn.
You know, it is a full blown game.
There is core design here.
This isn't a Zed run where we were like, come run a horse, you know, one time and that's it, right?
And we have stats to prove that tons of people came, ran a horse one time, and then there was nothing else
to do. There was a full core loop here. We really want to hold hands through this, build this kind
of community around, Hey, we are digital horse racers, man. We are really trying to send these
things to space. That's the whole point. And all the while, we're all collectively aligned,
not only as players, but as the builders of the game
in growing the racing pool.
It's important for everybody for the racing pool to grow, right?
If more horses are growing with more balance on them,
racing for more Zed, it's more exciting.
The space will latch onto us as being
this kind of coliseum of sorts.
And we're building the
products to monetize off of that spectatorship, which will additionally continue to grow the
game's economy. So there are a bunch of things in line here that I promise it will be worth it if
you kind of grind that initial learning curve and UX issues that, you know, it's a season zero.
I'm not saying this is like the perfect finish, polish, you know, feature complete product. But that being said, there is something going on that I think is super unique.
Something that we spent a ton of time, care and attention building.
That I think the people who loved what Zed was in 2021 will really enjoy this time around again.
Another spin around the track.
Yeah, why not? Let's do this this we've got quigs in the house
with the hand up what is up quigs yo what's going on guys i just want to pop up and say congrats
uh on the next step here uh trost uh everything's looking good i do have a question and maybe we
jump into it um on our space tomorrow night but if you guys are trying to move on to the next thing
but my question is like more about down the road or down the track i guess since we're doing that
um is uh is there a plan specifically around the tracks like can we look forward or did i don't
know if they got brought up earlier in the space but are are there going to be some uh potential
like sponsorships and sort of ownership of tracks in the game?
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, this is definitely something that I know there were a bunch of other racing
games that kind of experimented with as kind of part of that zeitgeist of, oh, we sell
land, right?
Like it's about selling land, selling, you know, property, selling kind of the machine,
right?
That would basically have some level of kind of passive income generation into the underlying game.
For us, we have this augment system, right, that is, for our users right now, something
they're just kind of learning, right, we knew that we needed to expose players to the feeling
of control within the game, it's obviously something quite new to them.
As they start to tweak with that system, as the secondary and the primary
markets for augment sales get introduced to the game and start to build out, we're going to
continue the world building up to a point where we feel like we want to have actual brands for the
augments, right? Like something to diversify them from each other so that the economy can grow.
The factories that basically make these augments are something that long-term, we would love to either have some staking mechanism into as part of what types
of augments do they generate? Maybe all the stakers can control how much the packs that
are getting sold for that different manufacturer are worth. I understand that for my players
listening, they're probably like, where the hell is this coming from? But we have a long-term vision
for how we're building out the world that we've created here. We've all been immersed in it for five years. And the world
building of a game is super important for why you stick around and the things that excite you about
it. And where we're going this time around, we're going to make sure that it's integrated into every
aspect of the core loop. If there's a company selling augments within the game, why not be
able to stake into ownership of them and get a split every time augment sales are sold of that type?
These are the types of unique opportunities within Web3 that allow you to grow much further than just selling land or selling NFTs to the next guy.
We want everything to kind of be, one, built around the underlying token economy, but two continuing to focus this like a laser beam of
attention on the racing pool because long term we truly believe that if you're in the top 100
you are the most exciting nft on chain you are something that everybody deserves to take a peek
at and say wait it made how much wait it started where and it's where now those moments will be
what can really scale this to be the most popular game again, right?
The most popular IP and capturing it with this app, you know, that is available in the
app store to hundreds and hundreds, if not millions of people.
Those are two like dynamite exposure points that we're really just trying to connect together
to make one really big boom.
So it sounds like I need to come up with a cartel.
Time to start stacking, yeah.
Augmentation, man.
Like we got to come up with some way for the cartel.
You buy the cartel and we give the horse a little extra juice.
Yeah, maybe the cartel steals from the augment makers, right?
And then sells them at a discount.
Listen, we can get crazy with this.
You know, we will.
The horse comes down with a terrible habit.
Is that what you're saying, Quix?
Yeah. So your horse is going to be better and faster short term, but by long term, it's like warning.
Yeah, sprinters. Sprinters.
Yes. All right. All right. All right.
Well, hey, no, that's awesome, man.
I'm really excited. The cartel stables are live.
We've got a couple of horses.
We're just starting to play around with it.
So we'll be in there.
You'll see us on in the game and looking forward to seeing what we can do out there.
So I'm looking forward to the next stage.
And yeah, I think, I think it's a good point.
Like, you know, instead of just making it sort of a metaverse kind of plot, you know,
sort of system focused in on what you guys are, you know, trying to, trying to do there
with the augment.
So cool.
All right.
Good.
Good to hear.
Yeah, you got it.
Thanks for the question, man.
Awesome. Thanks, you got it. Thanks for the question, man. Awesome.
Thanks, Quigs.
It's weird to hear you on the other side of the mic.
All good.
I mean, I'm always here, man.
I'm always either listening or trying to come up and ask questions when I can.
But glad to join and looking forward to seeing some of you guys uh in our
other spaces too so yeah yeah good stuff we haven't absolutely show your other base space policy
here so go ahead when's your space we got space we got a space tomorrow night every wednesday night
at 7 p.m cst cst the base uh space has been going on for over a year so if you haven't joined join
up listen in.
but we'll be doing some other spaces too.
Toki knows about,
what Fridays we're going to start doing a,
a space,
with the base builder account as well.
And,
you know,
we've got the on-chain summit space.
I'll be kicking off on Mondays.
I think those are bi-weekly now,
but,
we got,
we got spaces if you need spaces.
So come through.
Yeah.
Shout out to the base team, Toki,
and all the rest of the base team for really stepping up
and making this account, the Build on Base account,
available to creators and people who are here
and wanting to make content about base.
I think that's a huge, huge step.
It's a big step that a lot of ecosystems miss, in my experience,
where they're too precious or they don't want to use any official
accounts because they're worried about liability uh but base is like okay we'll just get toky to
do his side effects chirp at the start of this space and it's all gucci so i appreciate you guys
appreciate you base and it's been great having these spaces looking forward to doing many more
of them in the coming weeks and where's the easiest place toky for people to find the schedule
of all the build-on base spaces?
Because I think we're up to like six or seven maybe now per week.
Yeah, it's pretty insane.
This week we have 14 virtual events,
but it would be best to get you to our Luma page.
It's lu.ma slash base-virtual events.
I'll also share it on my Twitter.
But yeah, thank you to all the builders and
creators and to the hosts, the presenters, everyone who spends their time with the community to share
what they're building, especially in public. This platform on the Build on Base account is for you
guys, and we want to continue allowing your voices to be heard, your projects to be seen,
and everything that you're doing to be acknowledged in a way that is proper and
that can reach people who
might not previously have been able to see it. I love it. We have a couple people who are
requesting to come up and maybe ask questions. I wonder if you can just repeat whatever you need
to repeat in terms of a disclaimer before we bring some folks up to the stage, Jokey.
Cool. Sounds good. We'll do just a quick disclaimer
that we do have to give,
especially for people who are coming up to speak.
Today's conversation is for informational
and educational purposes only.
Does not constitute investment or legal advice.
Views express our own
and do not represent base or Coinbase.
Nothing shared should be considered an endorsement
by us, base or Coinbase.
Thanks, everyone. Amazing. We've had the ex-robots coinbase nothing should be considered endorsement by us space or coinbase thanks thanks everyone
amazing we've had uh the x robots who's waiting patiently with a hand up almost the whole space so
x robot did you have a question or something to say about what we've been chatting about today
was that champion hello forsy i want to thank you for all the years. I want to ask, we have one dream.
After two months, there will be the Tesla conversation in New York.
Elon Musk will open the new model Tesla.
And we will go there and talk about the X-Robots.
What do you think about the X-Robots?
Actually, I want to say anyone is checked.
We almost stay here like two weeks. we wait on the base. And we have a really, really big decision
art and we want to thank you for every bull years if anybody want to just feedback to
us and thank you.
So can I ask is your project related toASE? I'm checking the profile here.
Yes, sure.
Yes, sure.
Awesome.
Well, yeah, thanks for coming up to tell us about it and people can check out your profile
and also I want to say that do you know everybody is now in the X, the Kriopla ecosystem now
building on the X.
X actually is the old Twitter. And now we made the X robots.
And Elon Musk really love the X PNGs, X photos, X videos.
And we have now 1,000.
And we spent almost one year.
Yeah, one year to build.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for coming to tell us about it.
People will check it out if they go over to your profile.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for joining us.
Borat, you're here as well.
If we can try to get the topic on Zed here for the moment,
we're going to ask a couple more questions before we close out the topic for the day.
Did you have a question for our guest today, Borat?
I did have a question about the build on base account.
Sure.
So is it something that we can register for?
Is it like you just send a DM?
How would that go?
Yeah, go ahead.
I can take this one.
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter DMs.
We'd be happy to see where we can align.
But yeah, thanks for bringing it up.
Thank you so much.
I don't want to shell.
I was just curious about
how to reach out thank you
no worries happy to answer also I just
posted a tweet for
our Luma events if
one of y'all can post it maybe Toadie
yeah will do
I'll get it up on the Jumbotron
I see we
just got someone else up on the stage I've never
seen this account before but it seems
to be like have you heard of this before jack clink clinker clinker oh bring him up bring him
up good morning sires how's it going yes what up what's up alex how was the how was the pre pre
pre pre game farcon it's been great it's been great i am uh in my apartment right now jack lily and
bryce are in the living room working and your jack yeah my jack but well one of my jacks i i
have two in my life how are you guys doing what i just wanted to say hi i don't want to interrupt
your beautiful space yeah we're just this is a space Jack and I started doing last week.
As you probably could guess by the name, it's about base builders.
And today we've just been hanging out with Ryan here from Zed Champions.
Dude, Ryan is extremely based.
We had a very fun call last week, and it got me hyped.
Yes.
We have definitely been chatting, my friend.
So something that I want to, you know, I'll leave this just obviously we actually mentioned it on our discord spaces yesterday, but I described these the fact that we store the token tokens within the horses, right? Like when you breed 50% of the value of the breed goes right into the horse. And that's what you're pulling for entry fees. That's what you're scaling up. That's your balance. The whole game is kind of defined by that.
Where we want to go with this system
is to allow that spectators not only to play Zed Picks,
but we also want spectators to be able to add balance
to the horses to essentially own percentages
of those horses in a way, tokenizing the horses.
So I have been chatting with Clanker
and obviously my legal team and
running things by my company.
