The latest craze in the crypto world, and the Sydney studio behind it

<p>Chris Laurent was having dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the Hunter Valley, NSW, a few years ago, when he saw an advertisement for a horse available for stud.</p> <p>He mistook it for a horse for sale, but the ad was actually offering the owner of a female horse the opportunity to breed their mare with it for tens of thousands of dollars.</p> <p>It sparked an idea in him.</p> <p>He'd been trying to come up with a new innovation using the then-emerging blockchain – the 'distributed ledger' technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin – with a background in marketing, gaming, and the gambling industry.</p> <p>He had come across Cryptokitties, a 2017 internet craze widely regarded as the origin of what are now known as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, during his research. He combined the two ideas to create what is now one of the most talked-about trends in the crypto world.</p> <p>Zed Run is a digital horse racing platform where users can buy, race, breed, and sell horses that have been minted on the blockchain and thus have immutable qualities. Most importantly, the user has the opportunity to strike it rich if their horse turns out to be a world-beater (the most lucrative sale of a Zed Run horse fetched US$420,000).</p> <p>The company is backed by some of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capitalists and has emerged as a rising star in the world of crypto-powered gaming.</p> <p>The horses' characteristics are determined by code that runs on the blockchain and is known as smart contracts.</p> <p>"The traits are baked into the smart contract - like genetics," says Geoff Wellman, co-founder of Virtually Human, the Sydney-based studio behind Zed Run.</p> <p>"It's not completely revealed until the horse starts racing," he told Yahoo Finance.</p> <p>To some extent, the horse's success is determined by how the owner uses it.</p> <p>"It's not based solely on the horse; it's based on the user understanding the horse's capabilities as quickly as possible," Wellman explained.</p> <p>A horse, f