Let's Talk Splinterlands - We Have A New Roadmap!

Last night, Aggy casually dropped a new updated roadmap in Mavs-Chat and later also in the official announcements. As with any of these roadmaps they are more meant to give an idea of what they are working on then to give actual dates for releases. Aggy stated as much himself, saying that the further out a date is the less certain they become. Nevertheless, there's a lot to go through in this new roadmap and some very interesting dates attached to some of the updates we already knew they are working on. So without further ado, here's the new roadmap we just got:

For the rest of this article, I'll go over some of the topics represented in the roadmap and try to give an outlook of what that might mean for us moving forward. Keep in mind that all of this actually is speculation and I could both be totally wrong with my assumptions and dates could also be pushed back because of various reasons we don't know anything about yet.

Land

Let's start with a rather pleasant surprise first - the land expansion. We already knew that they were aiming to have land phase 2 out by the end of the year, but as it seems, they are now pushing to get it released as yearly as the third quarter of 2023. On top of that, a fully functional land market and the surveying part (which essentially is land phase 1) is meant to come out in the first quarter.

There are several reasons this is some exciting news. Firstly, well, we've been waiting for land for a damn long time and finally being able to do something with land is great. Emotions aside, though, land is really important for the economy, the sooner we get the land gameplay up and running, the better it is for everyone.

One part that is really important about land is that it is expected to be a huge DEC sink. So once we are able to buy our survey potions and once we are able to construct buildings, these sinks combined should eat up more DEC than what is available on the market right now. This should help a lot with getting DEC back to peg and that's probably the most important thing we need to do right now as getting DEC to peg is (at least a big part of) the key to fixing the overall economy and stabilizing asset values. There's another, maybe not as obvious, part to that, though. That's what my SPS claim page is looking like right now:

As was voted last year, right now the SPS intended for the land reward pool is given out daily to everybody holding land withing Splinterlands. For this month, that's roughly 222,000 SPS given out to land holders every single day. Personally, I don't think that the amount of SPS inflation is an issue in itself as it's just issued as detailed in the whitepaper. What is more concerning is that there's nothing to do with it and that it's just given out "for free". The former will mostly be fixed by getting DEC back to peg while the latter will (hopefully) be fixed with the release of land phase 2.0. Once the land is actually able to be worked and resources are built, there's no reason why that SPS should be handed out for free. Instead, there can be ingame mechanics that govern how that SPS is distributed. Ideally, it will be attainable by everybody, maybe in the form of burning land resources for a share of the reward pool or something. That way, people would have to actually invest effort (and, well, money) to earn their share of the pool.

DECB

Another important piece toward fixing the economy is DECB. I know not everybody is happy about the proposal passing and it actually was a rather short close, I maintain that having the DECB sale will help the economy and be one piece of the puzzle of getting DEC back to peg faster. Aggy indicated in Mavs-Chat that they already had a dev work on DECB so they are not starting this one from scratch. If all goes well, we'll see it implemented in January still. I'm somewhat confident that the first batch of 2B DECB is going to sell pretty fast, so ideally, that means at least 1 billion of liquid DEC less in the market as early as February!

New Cards

Several interesting things to note here. First of all, there's a quarterly promo card sale noted for each quarter. I really like that concept and I think it's a great way to do these things. Promo cards are great because they often serve to shake up the meta a bit. Both Runi and Arkemis find ample of play and are great cards for their respective rulesets. They also help to either boost sales for current editions or to maybe generate some outside interest. I know that the latter part didn't really work out (looking at you Fozzie Bear) but that I'm hopeful they learned from these mistakes and come up with better partnerships in the future.

Then there's soulbound reward cards confirmed for the first quarter, although I'm still hopeful we'll see them as early as late January. Making the move over to having soulbound cards is huge in my opinion as these reward cards are how bot farms currently drain the ecosystem of value. Without these, I'm hopeful that a lot of the low level bot farms will either go offline or consolidate and try to compete at higher levels.

Lastly, there's Rebellion now in Q3. Initially, there was the possibility of a release as early as June. With Chaos Legion going out of print at the end of March, that means we should have at least one more month without a new main edition set for sale. Personally, I do hope that Rebellion will be closer to the end of Q3 as that would give the market a bit more time to consolidate before the next major influx of new card happens.

SPS Delegation and Collection Power

One last thing that really did catch my eye was the plan to remove collection power by Q2 and replace the league gating with SPS staking requirements and SPS delegation. That's another huge step forward as the whole collection power thing never really worked well to determine which deck belongs into which league. Using SPS staked as a means to determine potential rewards will give another major use case to SPS and will also force bot nets to actually hold and stake substantial amounts of SPS if they want to keep draining value out of the system.

All in all there are a lot of positive catalysts coming for the ecosystem in the next few months and if they can deliver on these and keep their time lines, things could improve considerably for us. Bitcoin currently looking to get back to $20k should obviously also help, although it's too early to call anything as for all we know, this whole move could just turn out to be a bull trap.

Either way, I'm really excited for the next few months and as terrible as 2022 was for Splinterlands, I feel like the worst might be behind us... or at least we should have reached the bottom. It will take time for everything to come to fruition and there will be setbacks along the way but if we play our cards right, we still have a shot to be in a great position for the next bull!

And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!