The purpose of this post is to update the DAO on the current status of our ongoing projects that have been or are being funded by the SPS DAO. If you have additional questions after reading, then drop them in the replies and I will do my best to answer them or update this post as needed.
Today we'll be looking at:
- Validators
- Land
- Soul Keep Partnership
- Rebellion Set and Other Card Sales
1. Validators
The SPS DAO voted to hire JPTR Corp to finish development of the SPS Validator network. To date we've paid $160,000 out of an allocated budget of $480,000. Development has been progressing well and we're currently targeting a January release window.
The SPS Validator code has been made open source and currently the team is working in a closed test environment to prepare the network to go into open testing. There have been a few community members that have volunteered to help with closed testing, but we could use a few more if anyone has the skillset and desire to operate and test the node functionality please let me know.
This project has been a massive undertaking as the team is also currently working to prepare the Splinterlands backend to run with the validator network. After the network is launched, there will need to be work done to build out additional functionality and we could look into setting up our own bridges from BSC, ETH and any other chains we'd like.
2. Land
The SPS DAO voted to hire @cryptomancer to develop the Secret of Praetoria land expansion. To date we've paid $25,080 out of a maximum allocated budget of $172,800. Cryptomancer has remained under budget for both billable months so far and is going to be out of office for most of December and some of January for vacation.
We've been getting weekly updates from Cryptomancer in the land barons channel on Discord as he preps for the Land 1.75 release. So far we know that there are three new worksites and resources that are complete and that Cryptomancer has been reworking the land liquidity pools to track fees and prep them for resource to resource swaps.
Next up he will be designing the backend code for resource inputs that will be needed to output SPS or Research in the future. There has also been backend work done to prepare land for validators which will ensure that SPS is burned correctly when harvesting.
We haven't gotten a target release date for Land 1.75 yet, but development is coming along. With Cryptomancer being off for much of the next month, there likely won't be much more progress before February, but the DAO won't be getting billed for time off either.
3. Soul Keep Partnership
The SPS DAO voted to allocate 65 million SPS from the unallocated token supply to create a reward pool for the Soul Keep game. After a prolonged development standstill due to Splinterlands company restructuring, Soul Keep was sold off to its developer, Double Coconut, which ended up creating a new de facto partnership for the SPS DAO of sorts.
There have been some growing pains with this partnership as any of the original agreements were made with a different company and the game has changed over the course of development creating quite a bit of confusion related to the previous agreements and expectations.
The SPS DAO approved a proposal to clarify the partnership and expectations of how Double Coconut should return value to the SPS token with Soul Keep. At the DAO's request, the team has thus far implemented DEC burns and SPS staking mechanics as well as performed a complete reset on game progression to help fix issues related to early gameplay design flaws.
At this point, there isn't much to report as the game is essentially having to do a full reset, but we do have some info. Double Coconut has burned over 3.2 million DEC from in-game sales of Tournament tickets and Soul Boxes. There are currently over 4,000 players with 200-300 currently active in tournaments after the reset.
The CEO has done multiple AMAs with our community and says they are working on establishing partnerships to bring Soul Keep to web2 marketplaces to grow the player base and reach new audiences. They feel this is the best way to bring in new players and ultimately add more value to SPS. We should monitor this situation in 2025 to see if it pans out.
4. Rebellion Set and Other Card Sales
In October of 2023 the SPS DAO entered into a partnership with Splinterlands to develop the Rebellion core set. The DAO paid the company $250,000 to develop and sell the set and in return the DAO received 50% revenue share for the entire pack sale.
While the Rebellion set is still available for another couple of weeks (at most), we can already see the value of this partnership for the SPS DAO and the entire Splinterlands ecosystem. To date the SPS DAO has received over 1.95 billion DEC from the Rebellion pack sales.
The DAO then chose to reinvest some of that DEC into another partnership with Splinterlands to create a series of promo cards for the Rebellion set in lieu of a Rebellion miniset. The SPS DAO agreed to pay 600 million DEC up front for the creation and sell of this series of promo cards which became known as the Hall of Legends. The company later agreed to include an additional promo card via a new auction mechanism which is the Heloise the Hollow card for free.
While the Hall of Legends event as well as the hundred days of auctions for Heloise the Hollow are ongoing, we can already gather some useful information related to this partnership and extrapolate a logical conclusion assuming the sales continue at a similar pace.
The Hall of Legends event has already captured 416.2 million DEC back into the DAO's coffers while the Auction House has also accumulated 48.3 million DEC as well. While we haven't reached break even yet, it's important to remember that the final 2 waves of Hall of Legends and the remaining 75% of the Auction House sales are still to come. It seems likely the SPS DAO will at a bare minimum break even on the promo card partnership and most likely make some amount of profit.
The SPS DAO has already agreed to and paid for the development of the next core set, Conclave Arcana, by Splinterlands. Sales for this set will not begin for another 4 months or so, but if we manage to sell a similar amount of packs we should make 3-4x return on the DEC via the 50% revenue share model.