With the price action we've seen in the last 48 hours it's probably safe to assess that we are finally certain to be in a bear market again. 69,000$ is going to stay as an all time high for BTC for quite a while now and the market will have to adjust to this new reality. While it had to happen eventually, it still seems like a rather large majority of people was surprised by the sudden decline and most probably expected BTC to hit 100k before going down, some even saying it should go as high as 250k in this cycle. Whatever we thought, the reality is that it won't make it any time soon, we'll likely get another shot in 2025.
There are a lot of experts around here that can tell you a lot more about what's going on in the broader crypto space so I'm not going to waste your time with any more on that matter. What I really want to talk about is Splinterlands and the implications this bear market might have for my favorite (blockchain) game.
Short term, the implications are pretty obvious: The market is bleeding and so is Splinterlands. SPS is dipping alongside all the other currencies and DEC, only borrowing its value from SPS anyway, is following along. At the time of writing this, SPS is traded at about 0.1$ and there's no telling how low it's going to go in the next few days as this is mostly going to depend on how low BTC goes. No matter the crypto project, if BTC goes down you go down alongside it. There's no escape from it, or at least there isn't for now.
Splinterlands has proven in the past that it doesn't need a bull market to survive and even thrive and SPS had its own little bull run, including an impressive blow off top, without BTC having terribly much to do with it. Obviously, ever since, things are going down and they are going down still. This is not going to stop any time soon, either, so be prepared to see more bloodshed before things could potentially get better again. But let's look at the situation a little more in detail!
The good news is - there's no risk of Splinterlands going out of business any time soon. Over the last year, the company made a pretty amazing revenue and although some of it will be lost to the bear market, they should be more financially stable than they have ever been before. According to one of the town-halls they could go for 3 years without making any additional revenue right now and would still be able to keep the lights on and pay everybody they are employing right now. And that's the other important number to keep an eye on - right now there are more than 100 people working for Splinterlands - that's a damn huge number!
It's also what got me the most excited about the whole project right now. We've got to meet a lot of the new faces during the last few town-halls and damn, there are a lot of really talented individuals along the team now. It will still take some time before they all work as a big team and before all these new acquisitions start to really pay off but there's a real chance that they will eventually. With that amount of people actively working on and for the game, we could potentially see a lot of huge stuff added to the game in 2022.
We already know about the land expansion, we know about Rift Watchers, but there have also been some early hints about other things that we don't know anything about yet. If they do manage to deliver some quality content, if they do manage to really get marketing going, if they do manage to establish themselves in the eSports sector, well, then things could really go wild this year. Not only that, though. Splinterlands could potentially manage to decouple itself from BTC, at least partially. We are already seeing it a bit with card prices - these seem to be a lot less affected by what Bitcoin does and a lot more by what happens within Splinterlands itself.
There are risk as well, of course. Short term, there's a lot of selling pressure on SPS and the bear market is only going to make things so much worse. If things go really bad, SPS could dip another 80% from where it is right now. Even that wouldn't necessarily be an issue long term, but it would make their job a lot harder obviously.
There's also the risk that they fail to deliver on the new features they have promised. What if land is lame, nobody likes spells&items, and people just stop playing? Personally, I don't think this is going to be happening at all, but it's important to look at all the possibilities if you want to make up your mind about how to progress.
2022 is going to be a make or break year for Splinterlands. If things work out like we are all hoping, we could see another bull run for SPS and all things Splinterlands despite the general crypto market being deep in crypto winter. The company has the money, the gifted people, and the already functioning game to make it happen. I expect to see many other blockchain games die in fire these next months and years, but in case of Splinterlands, I think there's a real chance that it will go mainstream even before the next crypto bull market starts.
So what does that mean for me and my strategy moving forward? Well, most importantly, I'll mostly stop taking profits from the game just like I stop taking profits from any other project during the bear market. My goal is to still have a payout of 1000$ a week from all my crypto hustle combined because I want to prove to myself that I could live from crypto even during the bear market. But if possible, these payouts won't come from Splinterlands but from other projects. Other than that, everything I make within the game and even some that I make outside of the game will go towards growing my account. Once I've finished my Chaos Legion collection I will stack up on summoners and gold foil cards on a daily basis.
I won't buy SPS and I won't buy DEC for now, though. SPS I get from airdrops, staking, and tournament rewards and DEC is only valued above its peg because of the SPS airdrop. I might change my mind if we go below 0.05$ per SPS though - at that price it would just feel like I had to pull the trigger. Let's see if we do go that low, I'd say it's possible but I hope we won't. Either way, I know things are looking grim in crypto right now, but I'm still bullish on Splinterlands and I'm still convinced that the success of 2022 could potentially blow what happened last Fall out of the water if they play their cards right!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time.