The upcoming WAKA SPIRITBLADE purchase opportunity in less than 2 days, requires 500 vouchers and 5000 SPS in the in-game account in order to have the chance to get it. But, through the game there are only 500 available (they are pre maxed), with another 500 available on the WAX blockchain in the future. On WAX, I assume they will be more expensive, as I don't think vouchers can be used there.
However, while I do have the "buy in" ready, I am pretty certain that I am not going to get one, as while there is an economic hurdle built in, it really isn't very much of one for most of the accounts who will vie for a card or more. But, I was interested to see what kind of chance there would be and now that I dug a little deeper, it looks even less promising.
500 cards available and 500 vouchers each, means that 250,000 vouchers will be swapped in total and I assume within seconds of the sale opening. Is this a lot? Not really at this point, as even though there are "only" 20K vouchers being dropped to all SPS staked users a day, with nothing much to spend it on now that most people have the packs they want (they are used for bonus packs), they are just collecting dust.
I get about 5 out of the 20,000 daily:
I had to buy 260 off the open market to reach the total. Will they dump straight after, as those who bought and miss out try to recoup their purchase price? This is an interesting question.
But, doing some very rough calculations, using the Splintertools site, I wanted to see how many vouchers are out there. There are a lot, but while it only shows the Top 200 richlist, I noticed something interesting.
Remember that these are very rough calculations, but it is "around about" right enough for this purpose. If someone wants to break it down properly, that's cool.
The first account I left out of the calculations entirely, as that is the SL-HIVE account and has 160,000+ vouchers in it. I assume that is a Splinterlands account.
So, starting from the top, if they were able to buy all the WAKAs they wanted, how deep would the spread be?
The 2-21 accounts own 250K vouchers
Oops. that isn't going to go very far at all.
But this isn't what I found interesting.
The 22-41 own about 150,000
42-61 own about 90,000
62-81 own about 60,000
82-101 own about 40,000
As you can see, there is a bit of a drop away, but if you look at those numbers, you might notice something interesting (still remembering these are roughly calculated) where there is quite a nice spread of vouchers across those 100-odd accounts, with 1.66x being the multiplier between the first and second, as well as the second and third groups, before it drops to 1.5x between 3 and 4, and 4 and 5. Eyeballing the next 100, I assume that there is a quickly flattening and very long tail on the other accounts.
But, in that top 100 accounts alone, there are almost 600,000 vouchers, so there isn't going to be much of a dent made in the voucher holdings with this drop - but, what happens with the next? What if the next card required another 500 vouchers per card?
Assuming that not all of these accounts are going to go maximum purchase amount with their vouchers for this particular card and there will be a lot of people clicking at the same time on the platform at release, it starts to narrow the field of the future quite heavily.
For example, the average from 100-200th position is around about 1500 vouchers, so this means that those 100 accounts have 150K between them. starting from 200th position working the way up, essentially all vouchers would be eaten up until position 60 and a full 140 of the top 200 would be voucherless.
Currently, the vouchers are on the Hive-Engine secondsary market with the cheapest being priced at 2.5 HIVE (about $2.10), however, if you wanted 500, you could get them all for 2.58 HIVE - so only a few cents difference. But, if you wanted 10,000 and enough for 20 cards, the price goes up to 3.3 HIVE and if you wanted just 2000 more, it is at 6 HIVE. That is quite a steep climb, and that 12,000 vouchers is enough for only 24 cards.
Hmmm. Looks like there is some voucher scarcity on the horizon, as they are only getting dropped to the accounts that have staked and I am only getting 5.3 a day, with nearly 80,000 SPS staked on the platform. But what this means is that for example, if I am to be lucky enough to get this WAKA card, I won't be able to purchase another with "free vouchers" (the SPS stake to get the free vouchers is worth $11,000 - so not quite free), for another 100 days, unless I buy them off the market. And this is the same for everyone in my position.
The only people who will easily collect the vouchers are those with a lot more SPS staked. But, will they be willing to sell vouchers on the market, considering after a couple drops (assuming 500 needed), they are almost guaranteed to get the purchase, since so few have enough vouchers. But, they could sell too, if there is demand for the vouchers, but that would be only really the case if people assumed the card would be worth more than the cost - but with the tradeoff, a lot of the large voucher holders won't sell as they can benefit from the purchase anyway.
It is going to get to be an interesting little game - because if the developers drop the number of vouchers needed, it means that there will be liquidity on the market for people to have the chance to buy and then purchase, but the same situation would play out where someone with a lot more vouchers will snap up 10 of them at a time anyway, eventually leaving those who miss out, potentially disillusioned and unwilling to participate in the following releases.
Currently paying 1100 dollars for vouchers plus 5000 SPS currently at about 650 dollars put the current pre-release price of the WAKA card at 1750 dollars. I think it will go well up from there for those lucky enough to score one. But, the future cost of the vouchers for this might be where the real cost comes in, because in the future, to get another 500 vouchers, the lack of liquidity could have them fetching very high prices, especially if volume is needed, because there will be a very thin, but very spread price market. Buy one at 5 HIVE the next at 10 HIVE.
While I am setting myself up for missing out on getting this card, I don't think I will be dumping vouchers onto the market at this point and if they do drop significantly, I might be buying some more, just in case they are needed in volume for the next. Spending 250,000 doesn't seem to take out many at the moment, but the effect it has on who holds vouchers and how many are left for any future drops, might be quite extreme.
OF course, I might be completely wrong on all of this, but luckily, my assets are mine and your assets are yours - and we can each do with them as we choose.
Speculate away.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
