I’m kind of in shock right now. Over 800 people came through stream to literally just watch me swap tokens back and forth and chat Splinterlands. 70+ concurrent views for most of the stream. We burned over 3.5 million $SPS worth over $35k. Incinerated. Gone for good. Over 0.1% of the max supply of the token gone in a single stream for no reason other than the players wanted to burn it. I love this community.

If I created a Splinterlands league consisting of a series of open (ghost card) single elimination live tournaments would there be any interest, even if there was no significant prize pool?

The burning of gladiator cards slightly inflated DEC supply during a time when the entire market dipped. That faucet is gone. We will now go back to slowly burning DEC. It's looking like a pretty golden opportunity to buy at 88% of peg.

"Gambling on games [on Hive] is hard. Playing them is easy and free." I feel like this sums it up. We seem to disagree with some of the specifics as we dig deeper, but this overarching statement feels dead on. And the problem with it is the overwhelming majority of the space is gamblers. We have very few gamers.

Is it too late to join Splinterlands? Splinterlands has been around for 5 years. Participants in this space are used to games only being profitable early, so this is a nonstarter for so many. But this is one of the best times ever to begin playing Splinterlands. Let's look at why: 1) SPS token finally has potential to grow. I've got a long form video explaining this in depth, but basically Splinterlands spent the last few years paying off "debt" that accumulated during the bull when the system wasn't designed to scale (this has been fixed). Just last month we hit a tipping point, and now instead of burning that DEC debt, we burn SPS, which creates a bunch of new, continuous SPS demand. 2) A new set releases Tuesday (Rebellion)! Always a good time to join a TCG. Several changes have been made to help protect the future card values of this newest set. 3) The last set (Chaos) is cheap! Most players choose to play in "Modern" ranked format, which allows cards from the last 2 sets. There will never be an easier time to catch up, because the previous set is dirt cheap. It's currently 25% of it's original retail sale value. This is because the set was WAY overprinted. The sale was initiated at the very end of the last bull, but player demand shrunk as the bull collapsed. And it turns out many of the accounts were bots, and bots then got nerfed/banned, flooding the market with cards. Chaos was also given out in lots of promo sales and rewards that added more packs into circulation even though no one really needed them. Since those rewards finally stopped last month and land has arrived the value of Chaos packs have increased 60%. They may not be cheap for long. 4) Land has arrived. It's a brand new game mode for Splinterlands (resource management game). It introduced a ton of new sinks for both the tokens and the cards, which is beneficial to the economy and should engage a new type of player. I won't deep dive into land here, but so much is coming on that front. 5) The economy is still missing pieces. Why is this a positive? Because you still want to be early, right?! We are at that point where the economy appears to be functional enough that it's no longer bleeding out, but still early enough that there is tons of upside left and many more pieces coming that could provide big economic boosts. For example, we are still minting "free" SPS rewards to give to those who bought tower defense packs. This is just inflation that provides no ongoing benefit to the economy. But tower defense will be playable soon. And then those rewards will go to players competing in game for rewards instead, and open up all the sinks that go with it to provide economic boosts. More upside. So yes, Splinterlands is 5 years old. But anyone thinking it means Splinterlands has no upside remaining is just flat out wrong. There is as much potential here as any of the new competitors, led by a team that has already carried Splinterlands through 2 bear markets and emerged stronger than ever. #Splinterlands.

Look who has more Rebellion alpha to share! It's one of the most famous characters from the Chaos lore! If this gets 100 RTs I'll drop the full reveal in a video after I get off work this evening. If not, I'll reveal on my stream tomorrow evening. Either way I'm excited. Bera is an absolute beast! #Splinterlands