Crown Weekly: Road to the Kentucky Derby Begins

We've reached the final turn of Season 9, with this weekend's Virtual Kentucky Derby in our sights.

Between the exciting conclusion to Season 9 and the much-anticipated Season 10 windows soon arriving, there is Photo Finish™ news coming at us from all directions, but we wouldn't have it any other way.

Let's wrap up last week and prepare for this week's excitement with this week's edition of the Crown Weekly.

CROWN Stimmie Update

This week's Crown Weekly couldn't begin with anything other than with the news that those beloved CROWN stimmies have been extended through a much later date than initially planned thanks to a revamped ‘Long Tail Decay' disruption approach.

This change comes as the price of CROWN has significantly increased since the original plans were set forth, thus enabling the team, in collaboration with the community, to huddle on what is in the long-term best interest of the game.

File this one under ‘good problems' to have!

Read the full story in the community blog.

Beginner's Guides to Everything

In our continued attempt to add to the onboarding library this week, we added two pieces of content to help newcomers looking to hit the ground running.

ICYMI: The Beginner's Guide Library now features:

Be on the lookout for further additions to the beginner's guide series in the coming weeks as we prepare to smash new stable records and welcome thousands more stables in 2024 and beyond.

Sniper Support: CROWN and DGEN

Exciting news! Sniper NFT marketplace has enabled the support of both CROWN and DGEN tokens, meaning holders may buy NFTs on its platform with them or sell NFTs in return for them – it's that simple!

No more swapping tokens elsewhere or calculators needed – Sniper lets you toggle back and forth so you can shop till you drop in the Third Time SPL tokens.

The full story is in the community blog.

150th Kentucky Derby: The Countdown Begins

This past week marked 150 days until the historic running of the 150th Kentucky Derby. With the countdown officially on, Photo Finish™ Jockey Club executives located all around the globe have begun preparing to attend the race, live and in color, together for the first time in what is planned as an incredible VIP experience.

To begin the official countdown to the 150th Derby, we chatted with a handful of PFJC members who plan on making the trek to Kentucky.

Read the full story in the community blog.

Product Updates

In our weekly peek behind the firewall, CEO and Founder Ian Cummings dropped another quality list of new fixes and improvements the team implemented last week, including the ability to rename your horses.

Ability to pay $CROWN to rename a horse
More advanced DDoS protection
An additional tool for CS for quickly resetting/fixing MFA
Updated / official more aggressive tuning numbers for inbreeding penalties in preparation for next season
Initial back-end implementation of on-chain horse transfers (hidden to users)
Bug fix: Show correct horse counts on filters
Bug fix: Fix the broken age filters on Breeding
Bug fix: Slingshots

Space Vibes Wins the Artemis Cup

The $5,000 major series race of the week lived up to the hype, with Spice Vibes from Wimbledon Turf tracking down a pack of horses to secure the $2,350 first-place purse.

Congrats to everyone who qualified for the Artemis Cup and those who participated in the Artemis Meet weekend!

Season 9 Virtual Kentucky Derby

It's that time of the season again. The time when the best virtual horses, Photo Finish™, offer to compete for the digital equivalent of the biggest race in the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Road the Kentucky Derby week.

The leaderboard is already beginning to take shape, so hop on into the upcoming qualifiers to vie for your spot among the twenty horses that will take part in next Saturday's season finale!