This is a continuation of a series detailing my experiences stepping into DAPPs, Hive, and Splinterland. You can read the rest of the series at my profile.
Splinterlands Update
First, a quick update on my Splinterlands gaming experience. Last update I mentioned that I received a legendary Dragon Jumper from the 1st of 2 packs that I bought through Hive-Engine. I opened the 2nd pack on Monday, but didn't receive anything spectacular. I am accumulating Serpentine Spies, and will need to figure out whether to combine them or sell them at some point.
Deck 01
I've been doing some daily quests, and also using the quest potion to 6X my rewards. I have on my list to research whether it is worth the $0.75 to do that or not. One of my quest rewards was another pack, which I was very happy about, except that it also didn't have anything too great.
Pack 02
Other than that, I have been recharging my funds (last weekend's transaction was $4.70, and my budget is $2/day, so I didn't buy anything new on for the last few days.
I'm currently in Bronze II and am limited by my power. So my goal for now is to spend my funds on relatively inexpensive cards both to fill out my collection and to increase my power. I think that having the right card to slot into my lineup will go farther than buying a few expensive cards, at least at this stage.
Pack Economics
In the last post I worked through buying 2 packs via Hive-Engine, rather than with USD through the Splinterlands marketplace. I was happy to get a substantial discount on the USD price via this method, even after high transaction fees and poor SWAP.BTC exchange rates were taken into account. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into that chain of transactions and figure out how much I would actually be paying per pack if I were to scale up the process. Numbers will be at last weekend's exchange rates. After that, I will quickly summarize how things are going in-game.
From my previous blog post, my transaction started with $4.77 worth of BTC from Coinbase and ended with 2 untamed packs and 12.87 SWAP.HIVE left over. Now, imagine if I were to scale this transaction up by 25x. The hypothetical transaction flow would then look like the following:
Spend $100.77 in BTC on Coinbase (I am assuming that the $0.47/transaction fee is relatively constant)
Send $100 in BTC to Hive-Engine
Receive $100 worth of SWAP.BTC from Hive-Engine
Exchange $100 worth of SWAP.BTC for 869.5761 SWAP.HIVE
Exchange 869.5761 worth of SWAP.HIVE for 79 Untamed Tokens
Convert 79 Untamed Tokens for 79 Untamed Packs
Now, these 79 Untamed Packs should be worth, on average, $1.47 each (assuming both potions used), for a total value of $116.13. So that should be a profit of $15.36 on a $100.47 investment, or a 15.3% return. Not bad, if you could rinse and repeat! But, then you have to factor in the costs of the potions. Legendary potions cost $0.04 each and alchemy potions cost $0.05 each, so 79 of each of them would run $7.11. That brings the profit down to $8.25, or 8.2%. Not as good, but still doable. You're going to have to take a hit on the SWAP.BTC spread again getting it back out eventually, but could recycle this process a number of times by converting packs > DEC > SWAP.HIVE > Untamed Token > Untamed Pack > DEC. There will be a lot of variability in the pack prices though, so you'd need a chunk of money to do this consistently. It also depends on PeakMonster's estimates of value per pack being accurate. Nonetheless, I may try to complete the cycle on this chain over the weekend to verify that it actually works.
Pack Value
What do you all think? Is this a viable way to churn some profits out of Splinterlands? What am I missing here?
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! See you again neext post. If you are enjoying the blog, drop a follow or let me know in the comments? Also let me know if there are any questions that you'd like me to dive into in the comments. And if you are interested in signing up for Splinterland, please do so using my referral link.