I have been interested in the SPT token from Splinterlands which is used on Splintertalk.io first making a post about it now years ago on the 25th of September 2020 (Link). I can't believe it has been about 1 year since my last update (Link) but here is another one
@monster-Curator Shudown.
I actually haven't paid any attention and only now by making this post see that 
"This is a sad day, after five years of operation time and being the largest SPT-voter on the block. But since it has been a net-negative operation for a while and we cannot afford to continue like this, it is the only viable solution for now. I have invested hundreds, if not thousands of hours into this account alone, not to mention the entire@curation-cartel but all good things come to an end. Thank you for supporting us this far."
One of the reasons for me way back to buy a bunch of SPT aside from the fact that it was really cheap to buy a good chuck of the supply is that it was possible to get part of the inflation from delegating to monster-curator. So I guess it's time now to undelegate my 2 Million Stake. Looking at the current existing delegations still to the account it seems like many are unaware and still have their delegation in place which is kind of a waste.
So it's sad to see this project end but very understandable since there is...
Still No New SPT Usecase.
Splinterlands is still struggling as most of the focus still remains on selling things to existing whale players (the Overpowered Helloise Auction Card now) instead of putting focus on giving older assets more use case. SPT is one of those assets that is totally at the back of the line even though it likely would be one of the easiest to support given the fact that the total market cap right now is only 26k
Right now the situation is pretty much the same compared to what I wrote a year ago...
Basically, all the value is being inflated away and the current use case is one that nobody really cares about. The combination of SPT having nearly no buyers while there are still many who dump at the price they are able to get it made it where it is now.
It's also had to see anything change unless there is a crazy bull run in Splinterlands which could temporary pump SPT because people will start to speculate. The reality though is that the team behind Splinterlands who also created hive-engine have a bad track record when it comes down to a community content token like this. Things all started with the PAL token which used to be the first token created on Hive-engine to have it's own community and blogging platform where users get rewarded.
By now this has trended to near zero even though palnet.io is still online. It goes to show that if there is zero effort by the devs to give the token value it eventually trends down to zero.
Just looking at Splintertalk.io, it first just loads too slow and it kind of looks like shit to be honest. It really does have the potential to be a great site to visit for everyone who enjoys and wants to learn, read about Splinterlands and interact with the community. But in reality I doubt many actually use it.
Ways to give SPT Value
Right now, Splinterlands sitting on a ton of Hive Power which makes it so that blogging about the game can earn 3x as much weekly compared to actually playing with a 4000$ card collection (after it dumped more that 90%) and 3000$ worth of SPS (which also is down a lot). And this without any real risk or requirement aside from making good-looking posts about the game. All this Hive Voting power could easily be used to at least partially support the SPT Token. Here are some examples...
Require a ~20% Beneficiary on official Splinterlands Challenge Posts that goes to a certain account that uses those earnings to systematically buy and burn SPT tokens. This will make everyone earn a bit less in Hive and HBD but it would be somewhat compensated by SPT upvotes.
Require a Certain amount of SPT Staked to receive Splinterlands Curation , this would give an incentive for bloggers to buy and hold SPT. Based on the replies it looks like roughly between 80 and 160 different users are making content. If they all were required to own some SPT it would make it a lot more valuable.
However, for all this to be worth it, the front page of splintertalk should be improved a lot and possibly it would need to be implemented somehow as a page on the actual Splinterlands website.
SPT Market Caps & Inflation
This is the overall evolution of SPT so far since I started tracking it.
| Date | Price | Market Cap | Supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10/02/2021 | 0.000280$ (-) | 19,318 $ | 68,905,727 SPT |
| 22/04/2021 | 0.000310$ (+10.7%) | 23,123 $ | 75,621,474 SPT (+9.74%) |
| 04/08/2021 | 0.006190$ (+2000%) | 460,895 $ | 85,561,680 SPT (+13.14%) |
| 05/09/2021 | 0.015930$ (+257%) | 1,425,000 $ | 89,454,000 SPT (+4.55%) |
| 18/02/2022 | 0.003110$ (-80.5%) | 387,350 $ | 124,550,000 SPT (+39.2%) |
| 28/07/2022 | 0.001000$ (-67.8%) | 152,244 $ | 153,782,658 SPT (+23.5%) |
| 11/02/2023 | 0.000168$ (-83.2%) | 32,183 $ | 191,566,068 SPT (+24.6%) |
| 19/05/2023 | 0.000283$ (+68.6%) | 60,410 $ | 213,239,755 SPT (+11.3%) |
| 28/10/2023 | 0.0000928$(-67.2%) | 22,400 $ | 241,374,655 SPT (+13.2%) |
| 14/12/2024 | 0.0000938$ (+1,08%) | 26,010 $ | 277,294,844 SPT (+14.88%) |
About 15% More SPT was created in a year which remains very high inflation especially knowing nothing is done to otherwise give SPT a proper use case.
Personal Approach
Honestly, I'm not sure where to go from here as there is no indication whatsoever that SPT will ever get some proper support. Since I bought low and sold part of my stake along with some good rewards that it brought me over the years I didn't lose any money but it's sad to know that the best course of action would have been to just dump it all whenever things pumped.
Conclusion
Even though SPS didn't drop further in value the last year, it's still sad to see that no support whatsoever is given to it by the team and it feels like it going to get a slow death similar to what happened to PAL. All why it should be fairly easy to actually give it some usecase and value especially knowing how big the hive stake Splinterlands is.
