The Splinterlands team is extremely excited to announce that we have recently powered up approximately 120,000 more STEEM, putting the @steemmonsters account over 1 GigaVest worth of stake in the platform. That makes us officially a whale!

The fact that the vast majority of our revenue comes from outside of the Steem ecosystem allows us to grow and fund our operations while also increasing our stake in the platform rather than extracting value from it. We hope that we can act as an example for other projects on the Steem platform to set up their business models in a similar way.

Why We Powered Up

While we are all huge supporters of the Steem platform and think it's one of, if not the only undervalued crypto token that exists today, that's not why we powered up. We also did not power up because we wanted to have more voting power or more say in who the witnesses are - those are just added benefits.

Steem Power is a business expense for us. Companies pay for services that they use - they might pay an accounting firm to do their taxes, a cloud computing service to run their servers, or a payment processor to process customer payments.

Well, we use the Steem blockchain to provide a public, distributed ledger which allows us to operate in a more decentralized fashion (among other things). We have to pay for that service, and we do that by simply holding Steem Power. Unlike other services, we don't actually have to spend anything to use it, we just have to invest in it. I don't know of any other services that work like that, but we think it's pretty awesome!

You may note that, at this point in our growth, we really only need about 50 - 60k Steem Power to delegate out to our players and ensure that they can use the blockchain to play. But our goal is to grow the product by at least 10X over the next couple of years. If we're successful, then the ~500k Steem Power we have now may not even be enough!

Beta Packs Are Running Out!

In addition to needing more Steem Power as the game grows, the currently available set of Beta edition cards will become increasingly harder to get. The Beta edition booster packs went up for sale just about one year ago, and while 900,000 of them sure seemed like a lot at the time, it doesn't so much anymore!

We're planning on publishing a post in the near future with some data on how the Alpha edition cards and packs are performing a year after they sold out to give players an idea of what they might be able to expect from the Beta packs in a year from now.

But overall these cards have held up well, the game is growing, new stuff is getting added, and you're nearing the last opportunity to get any of the cards that can be found in the alpha or the beta packs. Cause once they are gone we're not planning on selling them again!