Splinterlands has just pushed the entire Hive blockchain to the top spot for crypto gaming transactions, according to dAppRadar's monthly report for August 2020: The State of the Blockchain Game Sector. Besides its industry changing NFT monster cards, the game features two currencies: On one hand we have the well-known Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), an in-game currency you can earn by winning ranked matches and tournaments or by burning cards and on the other hand we have Splintertalk (SPT), which has staking and voting power similar to HIVE, to reward Splinterlands-related content. In this post we will look closer at SPT and what is on the horizon for it.
What is SPT?
So far, SPT has not been having any effect on the Splinterlands ecosystem, except for a little extra incentive to blog about the game. Splintertalk has its own frontend condenser on Splintertalk.io, where you can find its own trending page, a fantastic way to find the currently best Splinterlands content. You can also find your SPT specific wallet there, where you can stake your SPT. Alternatively, you can use LeoDex for that, where you can manage all your Hive Engine tokens.
When SPT was originally issued, 100k SPT has been airdropped to each Maverick at that time (investors who bought 500+ Booster Packs), who had to individually claim the airdrop from the founders. Since then, a lot of SPT has been sold off and the price has plummeted while it was still lingering on the Steem blockchain. Since the token listens to the the tags #splinterlands, #steemmonsters and #spt, it is often even used without the authors knowledge! Now, with the transition to the Hive blockchain and some fresh promises by the founders, a new interest is arising for the token.
The Future of SPT: Fanart Skin NFTs
With NFTShowroom, the Splinterlands team has created a very cool platform for Non Fungible Tokens (NFT), where you can tokenize your art into blockchain-based assets and sell them on the market. This is the template for an upcoming fanart store, that will be based upon SPT as its currency, to buy and trade user-made images that can be used in-game as skins for the monster cards.
This will allow all players to individualize their collections with any skins they desire and give artists a platform to sell their fanart and earn SPT tokens for it. Buyers can either trade them from the Hive Engine market or earn them by contributing interesting content to the Splinterlands community.
This is an example from NFTShowroom, where Splinterlands is already selling the original art from the monster cards, here with Zodin Yaku as an animated GIF. This is not yet based on the upcoming SPT skin market.
Each skin will have a specific rarity, that the artists can define. This will make some of the better/rarer skins very interesting financial assets that might even grow in value over time. This is already true on NFTShowroom and will likely happen with the skins as well.
No further details have been released yet, so it is not clear how exactly this will all come into reality. I hope and assume that there will be some sort of sink for the SPT tokens, that will take some of it out of circulation forever, fighting the inflation of the economy with some deflation. This could happen via a market fee, that automatically burns some of the sales. But this is merely speculation at this point.
The SPT Market
There are currently nearly 55 million SPT in circulation, out of which 45 million are staked. That leaves only 10 million liquid SPT available for traders. Powerdown-time are four weeks.
The candlesticks from SPT on LeoDex show some massive price swings between 0.0005 Hive and up to 0.0065 Hive, which is more than 1000% difference. So far, the price has always bounced back to slightly higher than its previous low, as buy orders did not follow the large gap to the sell orders.
On the market depth, we see that that the first significant buy wall begins soaking up tokens for 0.0005 Hive, altogether over 1.3 million SPT.
On the sell side we have no proper sell wall and already push the price for the first 250k SPT up to 0.00374 Hive, which is over 300% higher than the highest current buy order. If you are interested in stacking some SPT, you are out of luck, as the market is way too thin for that. You might want to watch the SPT market for some sales or contact the owners of large liquid balances for some over-the-counter trade (beware scammers and only trust respected members of the community).
Earn SPT with @Monster-Curator
To earn SPT, all you need to do is create good Splinterlands content, like interesting articles, videos or fanart. The largest account of staked SPT tokens is currently @monster-curator, with about 25% of the entire currently staked supply (nearly 13 million SPT). It is a manual curation service from some of the largest stakeholders, including myself, that I personally use every day to curate the best content about Splinterlands. We have a sharing bot, that automatically distributes the daily curation rewards to all of its SPT delegators, based on their percentage of total delegations.
This way, we are able to give the largest upvotes of the ecosystem and reward the best content creators with appropriate SPT upvotes, distribute SPT into the hands of those who enrich the ecosystem, while keeping the trending page clean of any abusive or unrelated content. At the same time we are creating an interesting ROI for all delegators and make good use of their voting power.
These are the current delegators of the project.
Feel free to delegate your own SPT stake to @monster-curator and start earning automatic daily SPT payouts. The first payout might take up to 48 hours and then happens daily at 0:00 London time.
