New SPS Minter Contract Released

The Splinterlands team is excited to announce that a new smart contract has been released to manage the minting of the SPS token on Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Up until now, new SPS tokens would be manually minted once per month to cover the tokens being awarded for the following month according to the distribution schedule published in the SPS token whitepaper.

Now, with the new minter contract, the different distribution pools are specified directly in the smart contract and no longer rely on a manual process. Each pool defined in the smart contract includes an amount of tokens that should be minted to that pool per block on the BSC blockchain, and a wallet address to which they should be sent. Additionally, the new minter contract enforces the 3B total supply cap for the token.

The mint function on the new minter contract can be called by anyone, at any time, and it will simply mint the appropriate number of SPS tokens to each of the pools based on how many blocks have passed since the last time the mint function was called.

This means that instead of having all of the tokens for the following month being minted all at once, and via a manual process that could potentially lead to errors, now tokens will be minted automatically on a regular basis which better mirrors the actual distribution of new tokens through the game and will make the total supply more accurate for any given point in time.

Additionally, and most importantly, this new contract is a crucial step in turning control of the SPS token over to a decentralized governance system run by the token holders. The "admin" address for the minter contract is set to a multi-sig BSC wallet that is currently controlled by the Splinterlands team, but will be turned over to the group of top validators as voted on by the SPS token holders once the SPS validator and governance system is released.

This will allow SPS token holders to control all aspects of the minting of the SPS token via governance proposals, including adding or removing distribution pools, changing the amounts allocated to each pool, or even replacing the minter contract with an entirely new one if necessary.

The minter contract was created by @fbslo and was reviewed / informally audited by a top smart contract development group that we have worked with in the past for the SPS token contract and others.