The ZED RUN Echo Drop on Thursday, June 10, was not exactly music to everyone’s ears trying to buy their first digital horse. But with the Million Dollar Drop announcement, ZED RUN will be airdropping free Genesis horses to many who tried to participate unsuccessfully.
To recap, the Echo drop was supposed to be four waves with Wave 1 being reserved for users who received a broken link for the Tera drop. Stable-specific links were emailed out to prevent link sharing, cool-downs were implemented, but new bugs still arose, and ultimately the ZED RUN site couldn’t handle the traffic.
Although the problems were frustrating, anyone who has ever experienced an NFT drop is no stranger to a stressful experience. However, ZED RUN is doing their best to make it right, by giving away a million dollars worth of Z8-Z10 horses to stables completely free of charge.
ZED RUN Echo Drop Issues
When Wave 1 of Echo Drop finally began, horses were very slow to load in and when they finally did some users were hit with a 10-minute cool-down even though they had not purchased a horse. A bigger problem was that not all users had this issue, allowing some to bypass the cool-down and buy many horses. There was hope that these issues were just Wave 1 specific, but as Wave 2 went live it was quickly obvious that was not the case.
In their blog post about the drop, ZED RUN detailed the server issues which caused many of the problems.
“There was an unprecedented amount of traffic on the servers for Wave 2, in addition there was a configuration issue which meant that the website was creating 5x the amount of connections it should have. This excessive load slowed down the whole system, causing users to reload, which then caused further load and further failures.”
ZED RUN first pushed back the following waves 30 minutes, but ultimately decided to cancel the remaining drops and postpone it until further notice. Shortly after the postponement, ZED apologized and promised an update on Monday with a teaser of a big announcement.
The Million Dollar Drop
It turns out the big announcement was for the Million Dollar Drop (MDD). On July 1, ZED is going to be giving away $1,000,000 worth of Z8-Z10 Genesis horses for free to qualifying users. This works out to be 6,000 ponies and anyone who tried to purchase a horse during the Echo Drop will be eligible.
Other factors impacting the chance to get a horse in the MDD are:
- Date of stable creation
- Size of stable
- Number of Genesis horses in stable
The snapshot for these criteria has already been taken and the chart below details the weight given depending on the size of your stable.
Although many users also have multiple stables, ZED has maintained that they have a way to detect this and uphold the integrity of the drop. It’s clear the goal is to get horses in the hands of those new to ZED RUN or those who haven’t had much luck purchasing a horse in prior drops.
Overall, if executed correctly, I think this is a positive in growing the game and hooking new users.
If you have been successfully selected, your horse will show up in your stable on July 1 automatically.
What’s Next for ZED RUN?
With the promise of improving the drop experience in the future, the team has decided to delay the next drop event until further notice. I expect that to mean there will not be another drop for at least six weeks given the timeline of the Million Dollar Drop.
Impact of the Million Dollar Drop by the Numbers
Currently there are 14,670 Z8-Z10 Genesis horses left to ever be sold by ZED RUN — after that, they will only be available on the secondary market. The Million Dollar Drop will lower supply by 6,000, leaving us with 8,670 Genesis Buterins.
From the looks of it, this leaves potential for one or two future horse drops before the supply is tapped.
ZED’s Focus Moving Forward
Toward the end of their Echo Drop debrief, ZED spoke on their focus for the immediate future: Improving the racing and breeding parts of the game, which they described as “the heartbeat of ZED RUN.”
I definitely agree that these should be the focus and command most of the attention from the team. Breeding has not been available for months, meaning new users haven’t experienced new offspring, naming them, racing them, and the strategy that goes into breeding.
The drops are exciting and get a buzz around the platform, but racing and breeding are what give the game staying power. The utility of what you can do with your horse is what makes ZED RUN special — these have to be the focus.
ZED has a target date of July 12 for breeding and racing improvements — the latest sprint from the development team.
The blog post ended with a message from the founders promising improvements and to have patience as the product grows.
Do you think this is the best plan of action moving forward for ZED? Jump in the MomentRanks Discord and let us know, or shoot us a message on Twitter.