More Than Two Thousand Bucks From My Horses in a Month

Crypto-Based Income Has Never Been So Sweet

When you’ve got a good thing going, you want your friends to know about it, too.

So that’s what this dispatch is: A letter to friends to let you know just how good the opportunity is with this crypto-based horse-racing game I’ve been writing about recently—Photo Finish Live.

At the risk of beating a horse to death (bad pun), I want to offer you another update on this game and what’s taking place in this particular gaming ecosystem.

A unique opportunity really does exist here.

As of last Saturday, I’ve been involved with this game for exactly one month.
The big takeaway here at the top is this: In that month, I have earned—net of racing fees—nearly $2,300.

In one month.

I was not expecting that when I first started. I’d have been happy with a few hundred.

Frankly, and honestly, the game takes on a life of its own once you start playing. Someone on Twitter asked me, “On a scale of 1-10, how addicting is this” game? My response: “In truth, science hasn’t invented that number yet.”

Facetious, yes. But researching the horses and races, and then racing your horses for real money is that much fun. A truly engaging game.

And the fact that I am earning very real U.S. dollars as part of this pushes Photo Finish Live beyond all the other video games I’ve ever played. And I’ve played a lot!

So let me tell you where this money is coming from, and why it’s sustainable, so that you might better understand the game, as well as where gaming is headed in this new crypto age.

At its core, Photo Finish Live is built around three income streams: racing, breeding, and what I’ll call “investing” … but what’s known as “staking” in the crypto world.

Racing: Exactly what it sounds like—racing digital horses on all manner of tracks and in all manner of weather conditions. Each horse has its own set of strengths and weaknesses that define how it fares against an entire field of horses that also have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Breeding: Selling access to the retired stallions you own so that fillies and mares can breed with them to generate new digital assets, meaning new digital horses. Or paying for access to stallions as a filly/mare owner so that you can add a new horse to your stable to race, or so that you can sell that horse on the market to other players.

Players are earning some shockingly large incomes from breeding. Like, thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per month either in stud fees, or in selling the offspring of the female horses they own in their stable.

Investing/staking: Putting money to work in one or more of the racetracks in the game and sharing in the race-entry fees those tracks collect each season. (Seasons last four weeks in the real world, though they represent a full year inside the game.)

For the next five months or so, there’s a temporary, fourth source of income: Collecting one of the two in-house cryptocurrencies—called $CROWN. The Photo Finish Live team is giving $CROWN to every horse in every race as a way to fairly distribute the tokens across the ecosystem. This token runs the ecosystem, and it’s the token players invest/stake to earn $DERBY, the second in-house currency and the one used to run day-to-day gaming. (Players use $DERBY to buy horses, pay race entry fees, and to collect their race winnings.)

Those $CROWN distributions really add up.

In the month I’ve been playing, I’ve collected more than 4,150 $CROWN. And in that month, the price of $CROWN has soared to $0.70 from just under $0.30. So my $CROWN amounts to nearly $3,000. And to be clear, this is free money—sent to my account simply for running a horse in a race. In some races, the $CROWN I earn exceeds the cost of entering the race, meaning that even if my horse finishes dead last, I’ve still turned a profit.

Because of that opportunity, I am primarily focused right now on racing the 12 horses I own because I want to earn as much $CROWN as possible while the free money handouts exist.

But I am looking ahead to breeding and the big-money opportunities there.
I paid nearly $920 to buy a high-quality, one-year-old filly that I will race for a couple seasons starting in January before retiring her to the pasture for breeding. It was purely a financial decision.

As you can see, in the last month alone, the game has really taken off.
When I bought my first racer, I paid 16,790 $DERBY, or $210. Today, the lowest priced racer available in the marketplace is going for about 60,000 $DERBY, or $750. That more than 3x leap in price stems from the fact that gamers are realizing the passive income opportunity that Photo Finish Live represents.

By breeding my filly with an even-higher quality stallion, I can build up my personal stable of high-quality racers, or create new, high-quality horses I can sell into the marketplace. Assuming prices stay roughly where they currently are for foals, and based on the quality of foal my filly and a chosen stud produce, that’s $375 to $1,000 per month selling digital horses to gamers.

That’s truly passive income.

The questions I get from friends are: How sustainable is this game? Will it fade away?

Legit questions, to be sure.

The game itself is a crypto-based rebrand of a similar, internet-based horse-racing game. That game wasn’t played for real dollars, yet it was quite popular. This new, crypto version is growing even more popular because of the real-dollars aspect.

As for sustainability… the races are funded by the players, not the company behind the game. Each race’s purse—its payout—is defined by the number of horses in a race and the entry fee they pay. So an eight-horse race that costs 3,000 $DERBY to enter will take in 24,000 $DERBY and pay out 19,200 $DERBY.

Thus, the game is sustainable because the gamers themselves are funding the payouts. And when they’re racing for real cash, you can bet that game has legs.
Much of the $DERBY not paid out in winnings goes to the track as its fee for hosting the race… which is the income players earn by investing/staking their $CROWN. Again, highly sustainable because everything is funded by gameplay. As players demand more races, tracks collect more fees, which means those whose invest their $CROWN are earning more money every month.
That’s what’s helping drive the price of $CROWN—investors want that passive income from the entry fees players are paying to race their horses.

As such, the entire ecosystem operates symbiotically.

And because $DERBY is pegged to the U.S. dollar at 80 $DERBY per dollar, there’s no risk for holding $DERBY. That erases a challenge so many crypto-based games face—the value of their in-house token fluctuates, and most of them quickly plunge to nothing as gamers get bored.

Alas, Photo Finish Live gamers are not getting bored. More than 90% of those who start the game are still playing two months later.

All in, I’ve spent $2,566.37 on buying horses that are currently racing and paying the race-entry fees (I’m excluding my foals, which haven’t started racing yet).
Net of everything, I’ve earned $2,291.51… meaning that here on my one-month anniversary, I’ve nearly recouped my entire investment (and frankly, if I sold my racers, I’d triple my cost for buying them, so in practical terms I’m way ahead.)

But I still have several more seasons to race my horses, and I have my foals about to start racing in December and January… and I’ll start a breeding program this coming spring.

As such, I expect the passive income I’ll see from Photo Finish Live to really ramp up in 2024 and easily surpass my out-of-pocket costs for joining the game and buying horses.

As I’ve said in previous dispatches, this is what passive income can look like in the new crypto-based world we’re moving into. Better to get involved with it now, while it’s still young. Because as more and more people realize these kinds of opportunities exist, they’re going to flock to games like Photo Finish Live, and the digital assets necessary for game play are going to soar in value.