Rather than letting my DEC sit in my Splinterlands account, I decided to move around some to CubFinance on BSC so it gets me both SPS points and its working for me. In fact, the airdrop has definitely lead to quite a bit of free tokens to most Splinterlands players. Then again, it might just be the fact that I staked the LEO I was planning to move into Cub Finance and changed it to DEC instead.
Splintershards (SPS)
SPS is the governance token introduced for Splinterlands (formerly Steemmonsters) and more information about it can be found on it's whitepaper. The current airdrop is going to last an entire year and how points can be calculated is found on the airdrop page. So it is easier for people to see, I included the image below.
So from this point of view, DEC tokens in-game or on HIVE engine only give you one airdrop point but DEC tokens in the liquidity pool gives you two airdrop points. However considering the fact that you have to pair BUSD with DEC, you get roughly the same amount of points. I am currently unsure if you get double points or not since the snapshot has not updated for me in-game.
How to add DEC into liquidity pool?
I believe there are current two liquidity pools: Uniswap (ETH) and CubFinance (BSC). Out of these two, I will be focusing more on CubFinance because the fees are easier and I believe that CUB will do well long term.
Link BSC Wallet Address
If you don't have a BSC wallet, I suggest following the steps here to download Metamask and then connect metamask to BSC.
The very first step is to link your wallet which can be noted by that red box. The purple box is the DEC button which I will reference later.
After you click on it, you will press the Binance Smart Chain button on the left side (red box).
Then in the green box, put in your BSC wallet address. In my case, I put my metamask address which can be copied if you press the copy to clipboard option.
Afterwards you check the purple box and click the SAVE button (blue box). By doing so, your BSC wallet address is now linked to your Splinterlands account.
Transfer DEC to BSC
Towards the start of the previous subsection, that purple box for DEC needs to be clicked.
After you do that, you put the amount of DEC you want to transfer and scroll the wallet to the Binance Smart Chain Wallet. Once that is done, you can click the Transfer Out button to move it to BSC. I have noticed that Splinterlands doesn't actually charge you a fee for moving things to BSC. So in my case, I sent 500 DEC first to ensure that my wallet address works. Then I moved more DEC over to add to the pool.
So I highly suggest you do this to ensure that your address is correct. I personally would advise against abusing this feature though because they could start charging us the transaction fee instead.
Adding Liquidity to CubFinance
The first thing to do is to convert half of the DEC you wish to stake into equivalent BUSD. So in my case, I moved 50k DEC from Splinterlands to BSC and I would need 25k of this DEC in BUSD.
In the above image, you would first need to approve DEC contract. Then you can swap the DEC into BUSD. You can do so in the swap menu.
To swap the tokens:
- Set Top Token (in the From box) to DEC
- Set Bottom Token (in the To box) to BUSD
- In the FROM Box, enter the amount of DEC you want to SWAP. Generally you want to swap half of your tokens since you want to stake in the liquidity pool.
- Approve DEC contract if you have never done so before. Once you approve it once, next time you do not need to do so again.
- Hit the Swap Button and confirm the transaction
After that, you need to pool menu and do similarly to put in the DEC/BUSD into the liquidity pool. Sorry for the image above because I forgot to screenshot the actually liquidity add but you can see the results of my add below with how many liquidity tokens I got.
To add liquidity:
- Set Top Token to DEC
- Set Bottom Token to BUSD
- Enter the amount of BUSD or DEC you want to add liquidity. The other side will automatically autofill for you. Since prices change, you may not be able to stake all your tokens so just choose the one that fits and you have enough on both sides.
- Hit button at the bottom to get liquidity tokens.
One thing to note is that I could not deposit all of my DEC tokens transferred. I think it might be due to the liquidity provider fees during the swap so depending on how prices changed, change the amounts around so that you have enough of both tokens. In my case I didn't have enough BUSD so it didn't use up all my DEC tokens.
With this done, you can now add to the DEC/BUSD Farm to get bonus CUB tokens for providing liquidity.
First you need to enable the farm contract (confirm the transaction after pressing) and then you can stake your liquidity.
Why do I think this is a good idea?
There are multiple reasons why I think this is a good idea. First off I need to mention that you can face impermanent loss and you can read more about this in one of my previous posts. I don't really think you will be losing too much if you believe in the SPS token. Of course there is always the risk of impermanent loss making you lose out if there is a huge price swing in one direction. I do think the CUB you earn will make up for this over time.
In fact I think everything will be a net plus since DEC is well above the normal peg of 1000 DEC for each $1. Of course I could just sell out of DEC and run away with dollars but I just don't see the reason to do so. It's more likely for DEC's price to go down and I will be left with more DEC or SPS airdrop points.
What happens if the price of DEC goes up?
While it would mean that holding DEC normally would be more profitable, you are also earning more dollar value on your provided liquidity. The main reason for this is because some of your DEC is converted into BUSD. So in the end, your SPS airdrop amount might drop slightly but I think the farm yields in CUB and fiat value increase makes up for it.
What happens if the price of DEC goes down?
If the price of DEC goes down then the amount of DEC you are providing through the liquidity pool will naturally increase. As a result, some of the BUSD you provided will be changed into DEC. So the fiat value of your liquidity will decrease but it will naturally increase the amount of SPS airdrop points you get.
Conclusion
I think the advantages of adding DEC liquidity outweighs the disadvantages. The process itself doesn't seem very hard either so long as you have a BSC wallet (I used Metamask). Of course, you are also naturally earning some CUB tokens for your liquidity provided and you can always change this into DEC tokens in-game if you wish. However I am leaning more towards putting them into the CUB kingdom so it auto-compounds for me without much work. With the 2% fee taken out for adding to the pool, I do think I will have to leave my liquidity for a while to at least break-even and everything afterwards will be just pure profit for me.
Of course I didn't put all of my DEC over because I still have some outstand bids in PeakMonsters and I want to leave myself some DEC incase I want to buy or rent cards. I did move over half of my DEC holdings in the game to get have my DEC working for me.
Please make sure to invest only what you can afford to lose and nothing I said is financial advice. Feel free to leave a comment if you read my post. If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.