The play-to-earn scene is rapidly expanding and Splinterlands is helping lead it. Now, here on the HIVE blockchain, there are plenty of tokens and currencies involved with the game... heck, there's even NFTs! With the influx of players new and old coming back to the game, there's plenty of talk going around about this stuff called SPT and SPS. What are they? How can I get them? Why would I want them? Well, I'm going to answer those questions here in this article today.
Let's start off with what SPT is. SPT is the native token on the Splintertalk platform (where I am currently writing this article in fact). You earn it simply by creating content, such as blogging, or by staking it and curating another creator's content to earn a portion of the payout. I started blogging here on the HIVE blockchain, mostly on Splintertalk, about 1 month ago now. Over the course of this month, I have received just over 6,000 SPT (I'll get to its uses in a moment). Considering the current price of SPT, which is $0.01654, I have earned about $100 in value with no prior investment. This is just a personal example of what you can expect to earn if you write somewhat seriously on this platform in today's market.
(Screenshot taken from HIVE Engine SPT page)
Now that you are familiar with how to earn your first little bit of SPT, you may be asking what its uses are. For starters, you can stake your SPT to your account in a process called "powering up" and convert your SPT to SPT Power. When staked, your SPT can earn you more simply by upvoting other creator's posts and comments. What's more, if you find it to be too tedious or just want to have extra SPT come in automatically, you can delegate your staked SPT to a curator account to earn a percentage of that account's payouts regularly. I personally recommend 
Why would you want to have your hands on a bit of SPT you ask? Because it is completely free the whole way through, and you can earn simply by doing exactly what I'm doing now. Seriously, anyone can (and should) do it!
Alright, onto the really fun stuff. SPT and SPS are two very different tokens, despite the similarities in their abbreviations. SPT is the native token to the Splintertalk platform, whereas SPS (or Splintershards) is the governance token for the Splinterlands game itself.
(Screenshot taken directly from SPS white paper.)
As the use and value of the SPS token expands over the course of Splinterlands's development, we see more reason to invest in it. As you can see from the allocation chart, SPT will be given out via the various methods listed until it hits its maximum supply of 3,000,000,000. Currently, the main and pretty much only way a new player will obtain SPS is through the SPS airdrop system. Everyday, each player receives a certain amount of SPS based on their share of assets compared to the players' total assets (I'll come back to this at the end). As of writing this, the airdrop is on day 43 out of 365; once it reaches the end of its cycle, the airdrop is done forever considering the allocation.
Once you have some SPS, you can stake it to earn a pretty volatile, yet nonetheless, APR on it. This is simply an easy way to gain extra value off of your SPS, and with the rapid expansion of the game, there's really not much point in not staking it... so you should definetely do that!
Now, remember how I said the airdrop is currently the only way for most players to earn their SPS. This is because the developers are allocating exactly 900,000,000 SPS of the total supply to "Play to Earn" rewards; a feature set to be released soon actually. From then on (until the supply runs out), players will have another major source to earn this valuable governance token.
Well... why should I invest my money/time/focus into both rather than just one?
First of all, both are proving to be very valuable and are rising at a surprisingly good rate! Just a few weeks ago, my 6,000 SPT would have been worth around $40, and even when I was doing the math just this past weekend, I would've been at around $80. As mentioned before, my SPT wallet is currently worth about $100, and with the huge update to Splintertalk recently and all the new attention it has brought itself, I don't really see much reason for it to just drop dead.
Now, how do they benefit each other? Well, as mentioned before, you gain points towards the SPS airdrop based on your HIVE assets. The more assets you have, the more SPS you get with each airdrop. One asset that counts towards your airdrop happens to be SPT. Yes, the SPT you can earn simply by creating content on the blockchain free-of-charge. Even delegated SPT counts towards your points. Though its weight is nothing significant at 1 airdrop point per 4 SPT, it really adds up. For reference, 1 DEC earns you 1 airdrop point. Here is what my most recent airdrop looks like for an example:
As you can see, my SPT assets contribute about 15% to my total airdrop points, which is a pretty good amount!
Overall, in investing in both tokens, you can essentially earn SPT regularly by creating content on the blockchain and delegating/curating, which can then help you earn more SPS through the airdrop to where you have more to stake thus more passive earnings, which can hugely benefit players new and old if they take advantage as early as they can!
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Check out some of my recent well-received and informative posts!
Why Players Can Make Well Above Average Salary By Just Doing One Key Thing: Renting
Don't Know Where To Delegate Your HIVE Power? Here's a Few I Recommend For Passive Income
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Also, if you are new to the game and haven't started yet, consider using my affiliate link to sign up! Anyone who uses my link will receive a 100 DEC bonus sent from me to their in-game wallet as a thank you!
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