ZED RUN
Its horse NFTs did not carry over to the sequel
A digital horse-racing game from the Australian studio Virtually Human, in which players bought, bred, raced and traded racehorses held as NFTs.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2021 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Laurent | — | Now building casino games for the modern internet, @Standout_Games | Oct 2026 | |
| Nir Efrat | — | Unknown | — |
Timeline
January 2019
PlayToEarn dates ZED RUN’s launch to January 2019. The project let players build stables of tokenized horses; its later racing beta was a separate development stage.
21 July 2021
The studio planned roles such as stable owner, race-track owner, breeder and accessory designer.
28 February 2025
The game closed with a three-day Sunset Stakes event carrying a $100,000 prize pool in the ZED token.
How it ended
Pivoted away
Virtually Human sunset ZED RUN after six years to make way for a new game, ZED Champions, closing with a final three-day race event. Players got a month to claim, buy or trade reward badges, which would carry over to the new game and make holders eligible for new horses.
What happened next
- AftermathApril 2025
The successor game moved from Polygon to Base, Coinbase's layer-2 network, and was built around continuous racing and the ZED token.
- Aftermath24 May 2026
The studio announced that the season ending on 24 May 2026 would be the last for ZED Champions, and that the horse-racing IP would be rebuilt with the online crypto casino Clutch around live betting and horse pack openings.
Still alive
Open spot
ZED RUN is gone. Is your racing game still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
9 sources behind this page.
- 1ZED Champions shuts down, but IP is rebooting within online casino Clutch · BlockchainGamerBiz · May 2026
- 2Zed Run discontinued to make way for Zed Champions · BlockchainGamerBiz
- 3Chris Laurent (@iamchrislaurent) account record · Chris Laurent on X (account id 296129792), retrieved via twitterapi.io
- 4Zed Run Developer VHS Raises $20M in Funding Round Led by TCG · CoinDesk · Jul 2021
- 5ZED Champions Closes, IP Moves to Clutch · eGamers.io · May 2026
- 6Web3 Game Zed Run Shuts Down to Launch Zed Champions · GAM3S.GG (now games.gg)
- 7Zed Run Founders Raise $20 Million in Series A Funding · NFT Plazas
- 8Zed Champions Beta on the Horizon as Virtually Human Studio Moves on from Zed Run · PlayToEarn · Mar 2025
- 9ZED RUN game profile and launch history · PlayToEarn
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.