The DEC tokens have been going through a maturity phase in Splinterlands. It was the first token that the game introduced, effectively incorporating the play to earn system back in 2019. The initial design was to provide an in-game token with a semi stable value and use it for trade and price in the game. In the last months the price of the token was close to its peg due to the ongoing new card sale and the need for DEC to buy the new cards edition. Lets take a look!
DEC was introduced in 2019 and it was a reward token that gamers received when playing and winning games. At the beginning the focus was on providing support for the token on the downside, because usually in game reward tokens tend to be sold from gamers. To achieve this Splinterlands uses a so called “product backed currency” where packs and otter assets are sold in fixed DEC price.
Later, in 2021, the SPS token was introduced, that made the price of DEC surge on the upside. There were no efficient mechanics in place to limit the DEC price on the upside and DEC reached 10x the value it was designed to. There were some mechanics in place (printing more when the price is higher), but this was not effective enough to peg the price on the upside. This was back in 2021.
Since then, more tweaks to the DEC tokenomics were introduced. DEC is now not a reward token in the game. It can be created at a fixed price when burning SPS for DEC. This gives it a lot more effective limit on the upper side. On the downside, more products and use cases are introduced where DEC is used or burned. Some of the most recent has been the Land 1.5 expansion that requires staked DEC in order for the land to produce. Another one that is just fresh is the DEC fee to unlock reward cards. Users receive reward cards as locked, soulbound, and after some period they can unlock the burning some DEC in the process.
We will be looking at:
- Daily and monthly DEC created/burned
- DEC created VS burnt
- DEC supply
- Staked DEC on land
- Top accounts staking DEC
- DEC price and market cap
DEC Created VS Burnt
Here is the chart for the daily amount of DEC created and burned starting from October 2020.
A lot of volatility for the DEC token emissions.
At first, back in 2020 and 2021, the daily emission was low to around 1M and below. But then in August 2021, things changed, as the SPS token was introduced and an overall bull market for the Splinterlands assets begun. This triggered more DEC to be printed and for some time there was more than 10M DEC printed daily, that was x10 or even x20 from the previous emissions. These numbers dropped in 2022. Еmissions cuts were made in the following period, making the printing of new DEC tokens limited. Since then up to recently DEC was mostly deflationary with more DEC burned daily than printed.
The major way to create the DEC token now is with SPS burns. As the demand for the DEC token grows in game, we can see more SPS being burned for DEC.
In the last period we can see moves in the both directions, and a very volatile ones, although we can notice that there is more positive bars, meaning the DEC supply has increased.
Monthly DEC Created VS Burned
For a better representation here is the monthly chart for DEC created VS burned.
This is a much clearer representation for the cycles DEC has gone trough. At first small moves, then in the summer of 2021 printing DEC a lot up to September 2022 when the burning DEC started and lasted up to December 2023. A growth in the first half 2024 then a drop in the summer of 2024.
In the last months we can notice the spikes in April and especially in May 2025 when there was close to 1B DEC created in that month alone. This is due to the introduction of the new cards edition and the presale phase in the period. In June and July there is a small drop in the supply.
DEC Supply
Here is the chart for the DEC supply.
This chart probably shows the DEC supply in the best way.
Steady moves back in 2020 with around 4.5B DEC in circulation. An uptrend in the summer of 2021 up to August 2022 when the ATH for the DEC supply happened around the 7B mark. A downtrend since then and a bottoming out in October – November 2023 around the 4.8B supply. An increase in the first half of 2024 almost to 6B, and a slow decrease afterwards again up until April 2025 when there is a spike in the supply to 6.4B. Almost constant supply since then with a small drop.
When we plot this as a yearly inflation, this is the approximate data for the last three years.
| Date | Supply | Yearly Inflation |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1.2020 | 4,173,764,521 | 9.77% |
| 1.1.2021 | 4,581,715,347 | 29.90% |
| 1.1.2022 | 5,951,779,514 | 5.17% |
| 1.1.2023 | 6,259,245,902 | -13.55% |
| 1.1.2024 | 5,411,095,406 | 1.57% |
| 1.1.2025 | 5,393,883,993 | -0.32% |
| 7.23.2025 | 6,384,752,000 | 18.37% |
We can see that 2021 was the most inflationary for DEC, then a relatively small inflation in 2022 of 5%, 2023 negative -13.55% inflation, and the last two years, 2024 and 2025 a growth again in the supply.
What should be noted about the DEC supply, apart from the total numbers, is the structure and allocation. The DEC allocation is totally different now then what it was in 2021 for example. So although we are close to the ATH in terms of the supply, if we look under the hood we will see that around half of that is now locked or in the DAO, that holds 3B DEC now, while back in 2021 it was nonexistent. Another big chunk of tokens is now staked on land, close to 1.5B. Just these two position consist close to 3 quarter of the current DEC supply, while back in 2021 both of them were nonexistent. We will look closely at the DEC allocation breakdown further bellow.
Staking DEC on Land
Staking DEC on land is relatively new, since November 28th, 2023. Here is the chart.
As we can see, most of the staking happened in the first month, reaching 1.5B DEC on land and since then it has been almost flat, with very small changes in the amount of DEC staked on land.
The chart for the current DEC allocation looks like this:
Courtesy of https://www.splintercards.com!
The DAO now holds half of the DEC supply. This means that a lot of the DEC is actually not freely available, and the freely available supply has been going down in the last period with a lot of it ending in the DAO. The DAO usually takes a share from various sales that happens in the game and with the recent sale of the new card set it has increased it position for almost a billion DEC going from around 2B six months ago to 3B now. That is 1M in USD value if DEC is at its peg value.
The share of staked on land is in the second spot with 24%, then the regular players with 17%. The company holds 4% now or around 225M DEC, that is not a lot having in mind the presale was a month ago and the regular card sale is ongoing.
Top Accounts Staking DEC
Here are the top accounts that staked DEC.
The top account @vugtis has more than 220M DEC staked. On the second spot is @jarvie followed by @cryptomancer on the third spot.
Price
So, after all of this burning and use cases for DEC how is the price doing. Here is the chart.
As mentioned previously, in the past DEC had inefficient mechanics to limit its price on the upside and because of this at the beginning of 2022 the token was trading above its peg of 0.001 USD. Then the SPS to DEC conversions were introduced and this is a lot more efficient design. On top of this, the overall market took a major downtrend in 2022, so the upper side of the token was no longer a problem. DEC broke its peg on the downside, trading at 0.0006 for a period of time, or at 40% discount, for a short period of time.
When we zoom in 2024-2025 we get this:
We can see that in the period DEC has seen lows at 0.0006 back in September 2024 and on the upside it has not breached the 0.0010 limit due to the conversion mechanism. The upside for DEC is now transferred to SPS.
At the begging of 2024 DEC was at the peg and again now during the presale in May 2025. In the last weeks DEC is just slightly bellow the peg but very close to it, in the range of 0.0009 to 0.0010
In the last period DEC has been trading around the 0.0007 to 0.0008 mark with some ups and downs in between. The DAO is now in charge and a lot of things around DEC depends on it and the community decisions.
In terms of market cap, if we exclude the peaks back in 2021, the DEC market cap has been constantly been in the range of 4M to 6M USD.
All the best
@dalz