Growth Phase Update
Happy Season 19, everyone!
We have some important news regarding the immediate future of our “growth phase,” how we plan to allocate $CROWN moving forward, and the status of racing incentive credit payments.
In this blog, we outlined our plans for a one-year growth phase in April 2023 to accomplish the harrowing feat of cold-starting a horse racing economy. It's been a wild ride since, but here we are today with some impressive results:
- $22+ million in horse sales
- $8.7+ million in stud cover sales
- $34+ million entry fees in completed races
- $6.7+ million paid to track owners
The core of our strategy involved re-investing platform fees and allocating a substantial amount of our token $CROWN to what we call “stimmies,” the $CROWN gift you will see awarded to all entrants of most races.
Well, here we are, one year and three months later. So – what now?
First, we intend to continue reinvesting breeding and marketplace fees into the racing economy for the foreseeable future. How we stimulate the economy will remain fluid, likely forever, but we have some updates to share at the current stage.
To begin with, there is one notable change. When we announced the growth phase, 100% of these fees were returned to players pro-rata for their entry fees at the beginning of the next season.
In the past, you may have received a “Racing Incentive credit,” which was the portion of the reinvested fees that has fallen over time from 100% to 40% and finally to the current 30%.
Today, we are announcing the end of this credit. Moving forward, all of these reinvested fees will come in the form of enhanced purses or other incentives baked into the schedule.
We believe this will maximize their effect in supporting the ecosystem.
Second, we intend to continue using $CROWN to support the game. Initially, we announced a flat schedule of $CROWN (~4.23M per season for 13 seasons), which was applied to all the scheduled races. Some of these races were canceled, and their allocation was otherwise unused for the season.
Starting in season 10, we announced that we would take that “lost” $CROWN and all planned future expenditures and place them in a decaying fund that would pay 10% of its remaining balance as the budget for each subsequent season.
Due to its decaying nature, this fund would continue supporting the racing economy far longer than the original one-year timeframe. However, these allocations, too, sometimes are not fully used.
We will continue to find ways to use that recaptured $CROWN to enhance racing economics, such as season 19's outsized G2/G3 $CROWN stimmies and the Kingmaker G1 race purses themselves.
Last but not least, we recently rolled out a new $CROWN staking/claiming mechanism in the form of vouchers. These vouchers separate the $CROWN elements from the in-game status elements of the Photo Finish PFP collection NFTs. They must be claimed in the season they are associated with, and some of them are not.
Going forward, we will also use the unclaimed $CROWN from vouchers to incentivize the racing economy.
In summary, we do not take the ecosystem for granted and are committed to supporting it now and in the future.
