What if instead of “unwrapping” a digital foil pack to reveal randomly selected moments of NBA stars, you were to open the back of a digital truck to find a racehorse that has a real-life twin registered with the Thoroughbred Association?

If it sounds cool to you, you’re in luck. Game of Silks, a blockchain game that allows users to purchase the digital version of real racehorses, is currently expanding its operation to most race tracks across the United States.

According to Casey Dickinson, chief marketing officer at Game of Silks, the motivation behind the game is to capture the culture and tradition of horse racing and expose a new generation of fans to the excitement.

“There are traditional horse racing families that are fighting for their next generation to have the same passion they had for horse racing,” Dickinson said. “Perhaps non-fungible tokens are the things that can save it.”

Game of Silks exists as a digital representation of the real life horse racing industry. According to Dickinson, 15,000 to 20,000 horses register with the Thoroughbred Association every year as yearlings, and Game of Silks creates one-to-one NFTs of them all.  

When a horse becomes two years old, they start racing. “So you buy one horse, and when that horse wins a race, you get a percentage of the prize pool,” Dickinson said. “We’re at a one-percent ratio right now — if your horse wins a $10,000 purse, you’ll win $100 — but the plan is to scale the prize pool.”

And you don’t have to own a whole horse, either. “We’re letting our players fractionalize their horses to bring in that next level,” Dickinson said. “It’s a typical model where 90 percent of the revenue is coming from the top 10 percent of players, which works for horse racing because it’s not meant to be an everyman kind of thing. It’s meant to be exclusive, that’s part of the culture around horse racing. You have membership into this very exclusive club owning a racehorse.”

Game of Silks players can also get a chance to win a trip to the biggest horseracing event of the year.

“We have the luxury to do a lot of meet-ups,” Dickinson said. “We’re doing a promotion right now around The Kentucky Derby, whereby the people who own Genesis avatars in our collection — for every one they own — they’ll be entered to win a VIP trip to The Kentucky Derby to hang out in our founders VIP box at Churchill Downs,” he said. “It’s all about creating opportunities for the community and the pairing of real life with the virtual and making those things work.”

One key difference between the digital-ownership group and the real-life ownership group is the age of participants. In traditional horse racing, owners are often older with sizeable bank accounts. In the digital world, it’s a mix of elder traditionalists and younger millennial / Gen Z-types who are all now co-existing in the same ecosystem. What used to be an age and financial barrier between the two groups in the real world has been replaced by the shared desire to become expert horse race owners in the digital world.

“With Game of Silks, I’ve learned a lot about horse racing, and [the game] has a very similar ethos to web3,” Dickinson said. “The more you want to research [and] nerd out about numbers, bloodlines of horses and everything else, the more you’re rewarded for doing it. I think people look at web3 projects in a similar way in that they really want to know how certain projects are doing.”

It’s a user-incentivized research model that is no different from other fantasy sports as well. “If you know a running back just broke up with his girlfriend yesterday and he’s going to take it out on the field, that’s the kind of [research] that can be useful,” Dickinson said. “We recognize we need to do a lot of educating — in terms of people coming in from horse racing about web3 — i.e., Metamask wallets, how they work, and how to use them — and we also need to educate people in web3 about horses and bloodlines and how the auction price isn’t always the most important piece of information on the data sheet.”

He continued, “There’s a huge structure around the buying and selling of real life horses called bloodstock agents, who go around to all the sales and know everything about all the horses everywhere. Those guys could come into our game and probably do very well, and the digital version of those guys are definitely cropping up in our community. People are traveling to tracks, doing all of this research, trying to find the best horses. So it’s super rewarding the deeper you get into it. You’re wildly rewarded for doing research.”

A metaverse Churchill Downs?

Dickinson has a background in mobile gaming, so he understands what it takes to build a successful product. He also understands how to build a successful community.

“Coming from a free-to-play background where success was measured in millions of players, if we get 5,000 or 6,000 people playing our game, we’re doing gangbusters,” Dickinson said. “That’s also the size of a community that can be sustainable and awesome, where we can still offer really cool in-real-life (IRL) events around all of those things and tie it back into community first.”

Like many other blockchain projects, community is at the heart of Game of Silks and its overall operation. “It’s another really interesting element to our game,” Dickinson said. “We have a stabling mechanic, which allows you to cooperate, so if you have a horse and I have a horse, we can put both horses in the same stable and share the prize winnings from all of the horses in the stable. Horses only race five to six times per year, and their racing career is only five or six years. The idea that you can have a horse in a stable with 100 other horses…All of a sudden, you and your stable mates are watching A Day At The Races on Fox Sports Live and Fox Sports 2 and cheering on your horse, or meeting at the track because one of your horses is racing. It becomes a kind of community cooperative gameplay, which doesn’t really exist in fantasy sports.”

Game of Silks also boasts a real-world ally that’s huge in the horse racing world: the New York Racing Association (NYRA), which owns Belmont Park, Aqueduct Race Track and Saratoga Race Course. Game of Silks has an exclusive blockchain partnership with the association, which also owns a betting platform in a joint venture with Fox called NYRA Bets and controls A Day At The Races.

“As part of our partnership with them, they’ve bought a bunch of horses and they’ve given them to their on-air talent,” Dickinson said. “It’s a really big deal because these two-year-olds are auctioned [in real life], and one of the horses just sold for two-million dollars. Somebody in Silks is going to get that horse, and chances are, it’s going to be a really great horse. Somebody is going to own The Kentucky Derby winner next year in our game, and there will be a super valuable reward associated with that.”

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The digital and physical racing worlds are coming together in unexpected ways. “We have people in our community contacting the real life horse owners like, ‘Hey I own the digital version of your horse, can you tell me a little bit about it?’” Dickinson said. “They get into this awesome dialogue and sharing of information that’s super cool.”

To buy a horse, users must visit the Game of Silks website, where the horse’s identity is initially hidden. If you buy one and take delivery of it, a truck pulls up on the website and your horse gets out. After your horse leaves the truck, you can click on it, generating a PDF of the real horse’s actual data sheet — the bloodline and everything that’s associated with it.

“Digital ownership is a profound thought,” Dickinson said. “Once you understand it and realize you own the horse, you have a decision to make. You can keep that horse and look at what you expect the lifetime value of that horse to be, or you can sell that horse. The only time transactions happen are when there’s a mismatch — one person thinks a particular horse is going to be worth more than somebody else. There are enough parallels to the real world where people understand [Game of Silks] is just the digital version of that.”

When it comes to digital horse ownership, two types of Game of Silks players seem to be emerging: Those who want to hold their horses for the long haul and those who want to make a quick flip. It’s a delicate balance between engaging the community to stimulate its growth and protecting the community to ensure its longevity.

“The things that scare me are making sure that everyone has the same incentive around the project,” Dickinson said. “You’ll see whales come into projects and they’ll just pump the shit out of it, maximize it, and then dump. We want holders who will be holding their horses for five years. That’s how long the value chain of one of our NFTs is. It’s a five-year kind of thing. You might sell it, but somebody is going to be earning rewards off of it for five years. We want people to be holders who are in for the long term. So when we see whales come in, we hope they are fans and aren't just here to pump and dump.”

Conveniently enough, part of the protective barrier against a large scale pump and dump on Game of Silks has actually been its users. “We have a great community that’s super supportive,” Dickinson said. “They get we don’t yet have everything figured out yet and are doing it as we go along, but we’ve earned their trust, and I think that’s the biggest thing.”

That’s actually an asset. “If you don’t have everything figured out, it’s pretty valuable, especially from a marketing perspective,” he said. “It’s like, ‘What does the community think about this idea that we’re thinking about doing?’ As long as they understand we’re just thinking about it, I think the involvement is awesome.”

The community’s involvement could take on an even greater role as Game of Silks starts to think about its creation of virtual worlds and how it wants to be established in the metaverse.

“We are doing a virtual world with metaverse elements to it — interoperability of assets and creating stables that can act as marketplaces,” Dickinson said. “So you can walk around someone’s stable, look at their horses, put offers on them, see NFTs hanging on the walls and buy those. The stable is also a place for people to gather. We love the idea of sitting in your stable with your syndicate, watching races on the tv. That would be super cool, and we’re building a lot of things around that — and although the tech isn’t there yet — we want to be ready for when it is.”