What a ride its been
I still remember the days when we first heard about the new "SPS" token launching on Splinterlands. It was an exciting time and as soon as people realized that a large chunk for the airdrop was coming from DEC, that token skyrocketed. It became so crazy that I could earn 1 or 2 Hive per battle from the DEC rewards. That should have been a warning sign, but it was not until several months later that DEC finally went back to peg level (and quite a bit beneath it).
SPS itself was on a crazy ride as well. It shot up from around 10 cents to almost $1 in a couple of weeks. Everybody back then felt that this was just the beginning and that surely we'd be at $10 shortly. So when SPS dipped to 80 cents I felt that it was a good "buying opportunity". Well, SPS then fell to 60 cents, 40 cents and 20 cents. I kept buying, being convinced that SPS would recover fairly quickly. But for some reason I ignored the biggest caveat: the inflation was extremely high. Back then around 1M+ SPS was distributed every day. The supply back then was also only in the hundreds of millions, so it was relatively even larger so. I then discovered that the total supply would be at around 3B (billion)! I definitely learned my lesson to check out the whitepaper before investing into a coin/token. If I had realized just how much SPS would still get printed, I would never have made the "bad" entries between 20 and 80 cents.
Stuck with $10k+ losses
I invested thousands of dollars in the SPS token in addition to the cards and packs I bought over the years. With SPS and SPL asset prices falling it was starting to look real grim. My once $20k+ SPS value shrunk to under $1k in value. The only thing that offset this a bit was the inflation I received by playing the game and receiving the APR for staking SPS. I did not sell a single SPS in all that time. My card values also went down by at least 70-80% so that my portfolio was perhaps worth "only" $3-4k in total. This meant that I now lost well over $10k and a lot of time playing SPL. Sure, I did not just play the game for money, but that is always a factor in web3 games.
How did I make the come back?
Starting in summer of this year I decided to go "all in on SPS". I now felt that I had a better understanding of the tokenomics and the future development of SPL to warrant that move. The double layoffs of course didn't help and, honestly, just before the REBELLION Pre-sale launched it could have gone south. It was completely unclear to me if this game still had the community backing and would invest into this launch. If it hadn't, I think SPL would probably now be in real big trouble. Luckily, that didn't happen and the pre-sale was a massive success. This bolstered confidence in the game as well as the team and it was starting to become clear that Splinterlands would survive another bear.
Going "all in", is essentially what "saved" me (from those losses). I almost tripled my SPS stake in a matter of months and I also made the decision to stop playing the game and to focus on LAND. The main reason for doing so was that I realized that all of cards (around gold league) were about to become quite useless with the Rebellion launch (it's clear that older cards become weaker over time with expansions). It was a much better strategy imo to sell those assets and buy SPS instead. If the game was going to be successful once more, the value of SPS would surely increase dramatically compared to those assets. And that is exactly what has happened so far. SPS is up around 200% since the ATL and the "flywheel" is starting to take off with people actually burning SPS to receive DEC.
Conclusion
The most important lessons I learned from SPS is this: understand the tokenomics before you invest and investing more into a project makes only sense if you also have confidence in the team and the community. It's not easy though to pour more money into something when its future is uncertain, but it can be a very good way to offset losses. For me, the turning point was the successful Rebellion pre-sale. With much more to come and the economy finally being close to being fixed, SPL should have a bright future.
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