A proposal is being put forth to a vote of the SPS stakeholders to implement a system of burning DEC or VOUCHER tokens in order to receive a discount on future purchases within the Splinterlands game which will require burning DEC tokens.
The way this is proposed to work is that players will be able to burn DEC tokens in order to receive 1 DEC-B token (known as "DEC Batteries"), typically at a discount, such as 0.8 DEC per 1 DEC-B, for example. In the future, for any things within the Splinterlands game which require the burning of DEC, DEC-B tokens may be used instead on a 1:1 basis. DEC-B would be a typical, transferrable cryptocurrency token which would be available within the Splinterlands website, be able to be bought and sold on Hive Engine, and potentially be bridged to other external platforms in the future.
UPDATE: As a result of an informal poll in the comments, this proposal is being updated so that DEC-B tokens will be soulbound, meaning they will not be transferrable or sellable and will only be able to be used to make eligible purchases within the game, much like the existing Credits token. Based on the accounts upvoting the two comments below this post, roughly 31M worth of staked SPS voted for the soulbound DEC-B tokens vs roughly 11M worth of staked SPS voting for transferrable DEC-B.
For example, if it requires 10k DEC to upgrade a certain building within the land expansion, players would be able to use 10k DEC-B tokens instead of DEC for that upgrade. Since players could purchase DEC-B tokens for 0.8 DEC each (using the example above), they then receive a 20% discount on the cost to upgrade that building by burning their DEC for DEC-B in advance.
We also propose to implement the ability to purchase DEC-B with VOUCHER tokens as well, as we believe that it fits well with the main goal of the VOUCHER token which is to provide discounts and access to various things in the game.
The overall goal of such a system is to incentivize players to burn DEC and/or VOUCHERs in the short term in order to gain a discount on future features. Some of the features that we expect to require burning DEC in the future (which could then receive a discount by using DEC-B) are:
- Land Survey "Potions"
- Guild Building & Guild Alliance Building Upgrades
- Building Upgrades, Maintenance, and Boosts in the Land Expansion
- Future "mini-editions" (such as Orbs, Dice, and Riftwatchers) pending DAO approval
- Skins & Cosmetics
Any player who is planning to participate in any of the above features in the future would directly benefit from burning DEC and/or VOUCHER tokens to get DEC-B while they are available, which would potentially push a significant amount of future DEC demand up to now when it is needed most.
Please note that any items sold by the Splinterlands company, such as Chaos Legion, Rebellion, and Tower Defense booster packs, will not be purchasable with DEC-B tokens. DEC-B will only be available for new features within the game that BURN DEC tokens, such as the items in the list above.
Once implemented, the SPS stakeholder community can vote to conduct a sale of a specified amount of DEC-B tokens, at any price in DEC and/or VOUCHER tokens, at any time, and for a specified amount of time, in order to help bolster the demand for DEC when/if it is needed.
This proposal is asking the SPS stakeholder community to approve a sale of 2B (billion) DEC-B tokens for a price of either 0.8 DEC -OR- 0.005 VOUCHER tokens each, for a period of 60 days.
This means that once the feature is implemented (current goal is to have it live by the end of January) then up to a max of 2B DEC-B will be available for up to 60 days. Once the 2B DEC-B are sold, or the 60 days are up, then no more DEC-B will be available to purchase unless the community votes to offer more for sale, and the pricing may be different for future sales as well - based on community approval.
For reference, there are currently around 6.3B DEC in total in circulation, so if approved, this proposal would allow for up to 1.6B DEC to be burned for DEC-B tokens (assuming all DEC-B were purchased with DEC). Additionally, there are currently around 6M VOUCHER tokens in circulation (which does not count any unclaimed tokens), so if all 6.5M VOUCHER tokens were burned to buy DEC-B at the proposed rate it would only account for 1.2B out of the 2B DEC-B being proposed to be offered.
Note About Land Survey "Potions"
We understand that a number of community members are against the idea of an extra DEC payment option to receive increased chances of getting higher rarity and better resources on land when surveying deeds. We feel that implementing the DEC-B concept can help alleviate those concerns while still being able to provide significant new DEC and VOUCHER sinks in the short term.
With DEC-B, players who plan to survey land deeds can instead use DEC-B tokens which they can get using DEC with a 20% discount OR they can use VOUCHER tokens instead. There will be a separate SPS governance proposal for the community to vote on the details of an extra payment option for land surveying - it is NOT part of this proposal - but we wanted to mention it here because it would be a great first use case for the DEC-B token should it be approved.t