As sports gambling takes over America and crypto degens look for their next score, a new kind of competition has been born: Sperm Racing. Yes, really.
College students are set to provide sperm samples in next week’s competition, where their respective swimmers will then race inside a tiny course specifically designed for the sport. And yes, you can bet on the outcome with cryptocurrency.
It might sound like a joke, but there’s real money behind the effort—and, its creators believe, a worthwhile goal. The project’s co-founders Eric Zhu, Nick Small, Shane Fan, and Garrett Niconienko say the competition may prompt men to reassess their health in an attempt to boost sperm performance, and have already managed to lure in $1.5 million in seed funding from recognizable names in the venture capital world, like Figment Capital.
Here’s how the, er, novel race will work:
The competitors will have an hour to successfully ejaculate into a cup. These samples will then be entered into a “microfluidic chip” designed to mimic the reproductive system to engage rheotaxis—the phenomenon where sperm swims against the flow of a fluid. Whoever’s sperm finishes the course first wins the race, with test runs lasting anywhere from five to 20 minutes.
As you’d expect, this chip is tiny, so the race won’t be viewable with the eye. Instead, it’ll be watched via a microscope and then broadcasted to a big screen for the crowd of potentially 3,700 guests at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles—where tickets start at $20 with a UCLA or USC student discount—as well as livestreamed on the Sperm Racing website.
The race course aka the “microfluidic chip.” Image: Sperm Racing
At first, Sperm Racing gambling is set to be offered through MegaETH-based prediction market Sweep.gg, although some details are still being ironed out, a Sweep manager told Decrypt.
Long-term, Sperm Racing plans to create its own crypto-based betting platform. Co-founder Nick Small told Decrypt that there have been talks with a number of major crypto networks for the platform to be built upon. Once Sperm Racing has its own platform, the team aims to broaden which outcomes viewers can gamble on, beyond who will win each race.
Taking place on Friday, April 25, Tristan Wilcher from the University of Southern California will face off against Asher Proeger from the University of California, Los Angeles in a best-of-three sperm racing competition—the first of its kind. On top of this, there will be a “surprise celebrity race,” Small told Decrypt.
It sounds outrageous on the surface, certainly—but those involved insist that there is more to this project than meets the eye.
“If you take the time to read the manifesto and speak to the founders, you immediately begin to understand that this team is incredibly early to a growing trend in human behavior, and a rising interest in treating human health as a form of competition,” Jim Parillo, general partner at Figment Capital, one of Sperm Racing’s investors, told Decrypt.
Sperm speed boost?
Sperm Racing’s creators believe that there is a correlation between healthy sperm and fast sperm. As a result, the new sport is billed as a testing ground for how a competitor can improve their sperm health, likely through positive changes to their physical health—as backed up by a plethora of studies.
While some changes are obvious—like not smoking, and increasing physical activity—other studies have found that things like the Mediterranean diet could impact how sperm behaves.
As such, Sperm Racing could become the new frontier of experimentation for sperm speed. The project aims to spotlight how competitors have prepared for the races, already hinted at in a promotional video—which appeared to show Asher eating raw meat, Tristian showcasing supplements, and both working out.
Parillo, whose Figment Capital contributed to Sperm Racing’s $1.5 million funding round, sees the concept expanding to other sports as well—and potentially impacting betting odds, too.
“Imagine a world where Mike Tyson and Jake Paul had raced their sperm ahead of their boxing match,” Parillo added. “If they had raced their sperm ahead of time and Jake came way out on top, do you think it would have changed the odds of the fight? What if Iron Mike had won?”
It’s worth noting that there are many other factors outside of one’s control that could impact a sperm’s racing speed, with genetics playing a huge role in all of this.
But Sperm Racing intends to showcase what can be done to improve sperm health and speed, riding the wave of the longevity movement spearheaded by biohacker Bryan Johnson—whose reports on his own nighttime erections have already fueled prediction markets betting.
“Johnson has been a champion of the longevity movement,” Parillo finished. “Everyone is monitoring their sleep, their steps, and their heart rates 24/7 with digital devices. It’s only a matter of time before humans begin to compete at the biological level.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Generally Intelligent Newsletter
A weekly AI journey narrated by Gen, a generative AI model.
