Splinterlands By The Numbers

It's been a crazy few days in the Splinterlands marketplaces and I could talk a lot about it but instead of just my observations. How about we look at some charts and see what's been going on.

First, I posted yesterday about how it looked like the downward manipulation by the bots in DEC might be flipping to bullish. Well, since then the price of DEC in Hive has run from .0069 to .008. That is an absolutely huge run up and testament to how much influence these bots have when they want to push the market around.

These are very illiquid markets and just a few thousand dollars can be used to seriously push markets in whatever direction the manipulator wants it to go in and they don't even have to use it to transact. Just put the orders in and let them sit in the right places and that's enough to rob people of millions of dollars of value so they can make a few bucks.

Next, I have to say that I don't even fully understand what this one is. I would guess its the amount of times Splinterlands transacts with the Hive blockchain. So like cards sold, games played, rewards claimed, etc. Usually I wouldn't post something I know so little about but this move over the past two days was just too impressive to leave it out. If anyone fully understands it, please leave a comment explaining it to me like I'm dumb. Thanks!

Next we'll look at active accounts. This metric is the only one that never stops going up. At under 5k just a couple months ago, it's not grown to 270k accounts. Now I theorize that a lot of this is bots and people opening multiple accounts based on the fact that other metrics are heavily lagging this freight train of steady growth, but I'm sure there are still plenty of new faces coming in. I'd love to know how many actual human players play Splinterlands each day.

Next, let's look at games played. This is another one that usually trends straight up but over the last 6 days it seems to have forgotten to keep going up. My suspicious is that rewards are just too thin.

The documentation on DEC says there is a fixed reward pool of 1 million DEC each day that gets split between all the games. I know they must have increased that when the growth hit and it increases on its own when the price of DEC goes up in an attempt to flood the market with a bit more dec and send the price back down. When DEC broke its peg and headed higher, we saw that increase. I was getting as much as 71 DEC for a win in Bronze 1 a couple seasons ago. But now I'm lucky to see above 10 even when my ECR is full and I'm using all golds and alphas. So I'm not really surprised that games played leveled off and now came down.

Let's hope they revitalize that rewards pool and get people playing again. Maybe they let it go down to disincentivize some of the bots?

OK, this is an important one and I marked it up quite a bit so you can see what I'm looking at. This is new players and Spellbook purchases. Spellbook purchases is one of the most important metrics in determining real growth and it's a metric Splinterlands loves to talk about.

Spellbooks is represended by the red line and you can see that for a while it did nothing but do up. It hit a high of almost 14k spellbooks sold just 7 days ago. Yesterday it dropped all the way back to around 5000 sold. Now a month ago 5000 was being celebrated, but now it represents an almost 65% plunge in just 7 days and that is not great.

This is what happens though when rewards become get too low and card prices stagnate and drop due to oversupply. Splinterlands is not invincible. It had a few amazing months but it still needs a lot of love and nurture from the devs. They can't assume this growth can't stop just as fast as it started.

The blue line is new player sign ups. and as you can see, this hasn't gone anywhere in a month. I drew a few horizontal channel lines so you could see what's going on. Even when it broke out, it was pulled right back in and now its all the way back to the bottom.

Something interesting is happening though as illustrated by the yellow trend lines. That's a bullish wedge. It's a downtrend that gets stuck between two trendlines that close in. It doesn't have to work out this way but more often than not when it finally breaks out, its going to break out hard to the upside. In this case, just as it hit that bottom trendline of support, it's also getting toward the end of the pattern. It would make sense right now for it to head up to the top of that narrowing channel and try to break it.

These things are never guaranteed though and it's worth noting that when a bullish pattern breaks down, there's little out there that's more bearish. It could then fall really hard. So let's hope this is about to go up.

Next let's look at SPS. This has just been ugly. A lot of people say SPS will of course go down because they give it out everyday and that means its not scarce and there's plenty to hit the sell button on. It's ironic that many of those same people think we should 10x the card market and that will cause people to buy more cards.

I would say though that the price of the coin constantly dropping has very little to do with the constant supply. I am in other projects where the supply is given out daily and they go up. It has to do with two things. One, everything in Splinterlands has been in a downtrend for weeks including SPS.

And two is the fact that most people playing Splinterlands aren't investors but instead playing for income. Investors get new currency and they hold it for a later time when it is worth more. Splinterlands attracts people looking to play games and earn income. And most people tend to spend their income. They don't hold on to it hoping it becomes worth more.

That said though, I still think the investors are coming and I think this price is a gift. SPS in my opinions is going much higher in the coming years if splinterlands keeps growing the way I think it does.

On to DEC. As you can see, DEC went up, then it broke that uptrend when Bitcoin stumbled and continued down with the manipulation in the DEC market. After I wrote my post a few days ago the manipulation stopped and it leveled right out. Then today, the manipulation turned to the upside and it's looking like the price will start to pop again if it stays that way.

And here's the most exciting chart of all. You can see in this one a great example of that falling bullish wedge we talked about a few charts back. This is the total dollar amount of cards purchased in blue and as you can see, it was just dying on the vine. But then in just two days it popped over that yellow base lineand then launched higher off of it, bringing it all the way back to its highs.

You can also see that red line represending the number of cards that traded hands with its largest ever spike. If you look at the red line you can see that little bump in the middle of the line. That was a big spike before and it marked the top of the market. Now that bump has been dwarfed. I would say that's people buying all these new cheap cards but that wouldn't line up with the dollar value jumping that much.

If this is the new trend and it doesn't fall right back down, I think we will have our answer on the other charts. People buying cards means excitement and people making money and new players coming in to see what all the fuss is about and that's great. And as much as I'd like to stop writing right here, I do have to counteract this with something I find just as disturbing as this is great.

The rental market:

In what might just be a couple days of hangover after the biggest rental day we've ever seen, this might be the worst day we've seen since the first few weeks of the market opening. For close to a month we've averaged about 400k active rentals per day which have been worth about $30k USD per day. Today we are down to 330,000 rentals at an absolutely abysmal $16k.

Let's talk about this because I think it tells a story. And I think it's not a great story but goes hand in hand with the incredible sales numbers from above.

Two days ago cards that rent out usually for 3 dec were renting for as much as 350 dec. A lot of people saw that. Some of those people decided to buy their own cards so they didn't need to do pay that again. A bigger group didn't understand what was happening and decided it was time to get rich and they bought everything that wasn't nailed down to put int he rental market.

Now today, not only is there a lot less renting as people have their own cards, but there are so many more cards on the rental market that rental prices have been cut to nothing. This could lead to a lot of these cards being put back on the market in a hurry.

Or course this is all happening mere weeks from the biggest and most volumous card release Splinterlands has ever seen. So we could be in for an absolute train wreck of inventory which is a big part of what derailed this freight train a few weeks ago. Let's hope the devs realize this and keep the card counts in CL reasonable.

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