Welcome back to the Tribe! In this post we are going to talk about the hypothetical scenario where Zed Run goes main stream. What will that look like, is Zed Run ready, and how can they prepare for such a move?
Nothing should be considered investment or financial advice. Enjoy the ride!
Is Zed Run Ready
Ready to play? yes, ready for the mass market? Well that might be another question all together.
What do we mean when we say “mass market” anyways? Do we mean that Zed Run is a common house hold term, or do we just simply mean popular throughout the blockchain industry?
Well, we like to think it is a mix.
Mass market to us means somewhere over 1-10 million users world wide, the platform holds a stable reputation in the blockchain and gambling industry, as well as it starting to break into the gaming industry as a clear example on how to monetize NFTs.
Currently, Zed has close to a hundred thousands users, although active users is still in the tens of thousands per week at this point. This also varies greatly on the status of the platform.
During the recent Zed Run official tournament, there were many more active users racing, breeding, and over all participating across the platform.
Here is a Tweet showing the change in racers, horses, and distinct stables thanks to a Zed Run community member bg.
week 45 is incomplete (there's still ~27 hours left in it) but it's a huge drop in terms of distinct stables and distinct horses racing (somewhat expected due to no tourney/no free races/horses stuck in expensive classes) pic.twitter.com/jCdk91TLNX
— bg (@bg_alt) November 5, 2021
As we can see from the Tweet above, the number of users is drastically changing from before after the tournament.
What we can conclude from these numbers is that people want more.
More racing, more utility, and more purpose for the platform. The tournament served to give people a taste of what that might look like. Given the right tools, users will flood the platform, and Zed Run will be able to hit that “mass market” point.
Mass Market
Although, we need to reach back to the original question of – are they ready?
From the utility stand point, there can be a strong argument that the answer is no.
Unfortunately, the answers do not get any better when you take a look at the status of the platform (staying functional), the amount of races available on the platform (in terms of distances and classes), and the actual team behind the platform.
Lets break these down more to discuss.
Platform Status
It is no secret that the platform, still in BETA, is currently struggling to keep up with the stress of changes, updates, and users.
Personally, we have experienced several bugs alone in the past few months since we have been on the platform.
While the support team is fantastic in addressing these issues, that is only because the amount of requests are still minor compared to a platform responding to thousands per day – aka mass market issues.
We can take a look back at 2016 and 2017 for an example. When Coinbase and Binance first started to reach mass market adoption and crypto was becoming more main stream there were a ton of issues that came with it. Both platforms struggled severely when the influx of users hit mass market.
Here is what it looked like:
- Users were white listed and waited months to simply get an account
- Stuck funds took weeks to address making investors and users leave the platforms daily
- Compliance issues scaled to global efforts and started to cost the platforms millions (we know from personal contacts)
- Internal stress created more problems than solutions for the teams trying to help users
- Platform failures were constant and withdraw freezes were common due to misappropriated funds and backend issues
These are issues that some of the most well funded and secure platforms experienced WITH great development teams behind them.
Races Available
Another debatable issue is the amount of races available.
Not specifically just any race, but the right races for the right horses, in the right classes.
Just this past week after the official Zed Run tournament, we have completely stopped racing due to the lack of right races.
Not to mentioned the amount of time stable owners who are racing need to allocate to the platform just to make sure they can secure these races.
We don’t want to beat this dead horse, since we already did in another post, and Zed has publicly acknowledged the problem and are working on a fix.
To reiterate our other post, the overhaul could use:
- More segregation among horses
- Separate tracks all together for more experienced stables and newer ones
- More available races per distance and per price point
These are just a start to prepare Zed for those next steps.
Zed Team
The last thing to discuss is the Zed team behind everything.
While they are doing a terrific job with their current resources, the main idea is to expand – and quickly. By expand, we mean team members.
Already they are 80+ team members strong, and constantly on the look out for new talent to come on-board.
Specifically, they will need to grow out their development and support teams in order to potentially deal with hundreds or thousands of users in the coming years.
The amount of email requests, bug fixes, and suggestions to consider from all of those users will ultimately take a small village to deal with.
A lot of companies simply look to out source these issues, but we think an internal solution is just as good if not better.
Creating global offices in the coming years, might help to alleviate some of the stress and issues of being a 24/7 platform!
Is Zed Ready Post
Thanks for reading this post on Is Zed Run ready for mass market and what it might look like!
We have faith in the team and product, this post (as always) is more just for fun and discussion’s sake.
Cheers
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