WaveWarZ.
Music battles. Artists compete, the community decides, the result settles on its own. 1,289 battles and counting.
What it is
WaveWarZ is a music battle platform. Artists go head to head, the community decides who wins, and the result settles automatically. It has been running since 2025 and is the most battle-tested product in the ZAO ecosystem.
The numbers
Production figures as of July 2026, not projections. Sourced from the WaveWarZ financials snapshot rather than the older whitepaper summary - the two disagree, and the July numbers are the current ones.
- 878.30 SOL moved through battles
- 1,289 production battles completed
- Grown from a three-person launch in October 2025 into a multi-chain platform
Settlement runs primarily on Solana, with Base contracts deployed to testnet in February 2026. Multi-chain rather than single-chain is the current direction.
Distribution
WaveWarZ grew through partners rather than paid acquisition. The working network includes Coinflow for payments, Juke, Empire Builder, Neynar on the Farcaster side, RAM across Africa, and Privy for onboarding.
A separate line is the AI artist tournament, treated as its own product rather than a feature of human battles.
What it does not do
WaveWarZ settles a battle. It has no concept of funding something that has not happened yet. Every mechanic is per-battle and after the fact, which is exactly the gap if you are designing a way for a community to fund an event in advance.
The open problem
This is the part we have not solved, and it is the August Finals bonus challenge.
Every funding path above is either a grant, a sponsor, or a ticket. All three are one-directional: money comes in, the event happens, and the people who showed up own none of what they helped make. There is no way for the community that funds something to share in it afterwards.
What already exists inside ZAO, so you are not rediscovering it: a creator-coin launcher with multi-recipient fee splits (Sparkz, shipped), a decided ticketing stack of Unlock plus POAP for ZAOstock, an evaluated set of event treasury tools, and a raw idea for a group crowdfund that was never scoped. What does not exist is fan co-ownership, anything that works across more than one event, and any way to reward people after an event rather than before it.
Design one of those and you are inventing something. Build another creator token and you are rebuilding what is already running.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page traces to a source. If one looks wrong, it is checkable.
- Battle counts and SOL volume: ZAOOS research doc 974, the WaveWarZ financials snapshot validated 2026-07-23. Doc 743 carries an older May figure in one table and the July figure in three other places; the July figure is used here
- Base contract deployment date: doc 743, verified against the wavewarz-base repo
- Partner network: doc 743. Two partners named in that doc were retired in July 2026 and are deliberately not listed here