I believe investor sentiment on Splinterlands has definitely improved as for some people like me, the question I ask recently: Where Should I Invest Further in Splinterlands?
Conclave Arcana: I participated in the Presale!
With Conclave Arcana (CA) being the second core set released, this now makes the Chaos Legion set obsolete and put into wild. I readily participated in the CA Pre-Sale and eventually bought Legendary packs based on my analysis. I spent around $400, which was the minimum to at least get a Promo Legendary card. I bulked up in Hive and DEC in preparation to the PreSale.
I liked the burning mechanism implemented in Rebellion packs which helps in controlling the supply. This will be done the same to CA which boosted my confidence in buying packs.
Be a Land Baron? -- Not Now, Maybe in the Future?
The Land game has been ongoing for some time now since the 1.75 release and some players have been focusing more there. I personally only have 2 (grain and iron) and to be a Land Baron/Mav, minimum is 50. Right now, I guess it's more on rebalancing/building phase so I know several players investing through this route.
At the current state, land as a yield earner isn't doing quite well, since its client base is still limited. As they say, Land is finite, and market prices right now are still favorable. I think it is still early and speculative; hence, I wouldn't take that risk yet. On the other hand, I was already eyeing something else aside from CA Presale.
Validator License -- Yes!!!
Thanks a lot to @dalz / @dalz.shorts for his post which gave me an idea to get one as well. Although it took me about a month before my buy bid got matched (being a scrooge) as prices were already rising. My newly bought license was even sitting idle for a week since I didn't expect my 1350 Hive bid to be hit, but thankful I finally got mine! Prices right now have gone up from ~$300 to around ~$400. Whales like @bubke gobbled up several licenses and also believe that it gives good yield.
Why did I purchase a Validator License? -- Yield
Aside from Playing, one motivation for me is the investment and technology of such blockchain games.
I have talked earlier about different ways of earning through Splinterlands. I'll just add License SPS Rewards then.
I have spent ~34k SPS equivalent to get a License. By simply activating it and through the help of @peakmonsters, anyone can simply setup to earn SPS. Current rate is ~24 SPS per day. Multiplied by 30 (days per month) and 12 months in a year, Licenses can give us ~8,640 per year. This gives me around 25% yield.
SPS Staking Reward is just around 10.8% per year, so simply comparing the two, it makes sense to shift some SPS to purchase a license.
Rewards from activating a Node license is based on a monthly 3,375,000 SPS divided equally to all License holders. In addition, 20,000 vouchers per day is also distributed. This means, the fewer the license holders, bigger the dividends.
Looking at the numbers above, we see that there are only 3,592 earning licenses which is just around 72% of all released licenses. In a way, supply is limited because to increase further the supply, buying it in-game is currently not practical ($5000 or 511k SPS). Even from this perspective, current secondary market price is already undervalued and the only way to increase supply is for the remaining 28% idle licenses to be sold and transferred to new owners.
It's always nice to have a worthy purchase. My daily license rewards now matches my SPS staking rewards. So, it's like using up 30% of my SPS to double my daily SPS rewards. Currently, staking licenses through @peakmonsters is still free up to the end of May. I do hope any future fees would be negligible. I might consider learning how to setup my own node someday.
Image sources: peakmonsters.com , splinterlands.com