It has been a very busy and exciting month for Rising Star. Here are the headlines:
- ⭐ The L7 John card—among the most sought after in the game—has finally reached its print limit.
- ⭐ Jux and team scramble to release new cards early due to surge in pack opening
- ⭐ For what might be the first time, four Rising Star Twitch streamers were online at the same time
- ⭐ Splinterlands OG @clove71 approaches the Top Player podium
- ⭐ STARBITS prices rally, and flirt with their "soft peg" price of 0.0004 HIVE
- ⭐ Active Player count tops 6,000!
#1 L7 John has been discontinued ⛔
Good old John was first minted on July 21, 2020. Unlike many Legendary cards, there were 75 available. Also unlike any other Legendary (to date), John had over 30,000 in combined Fan and Skill stats.
If you check out the market history over at RSGFam, you'll notice that a John card has only traded on the market 12 times in its history on RSG—10 with SWAP.HIVE, 2 with ~700 VIBES tokens. (The value of 700 VIBES today is less than $5 USD so I hope those sellers cashed their value! 😬)
The lucky last L7 John appeared in a single pack opening by @yepspey! They blogged about it here (ESP/ENG) and shared some insight on how it impacted their stats. 🎉🎉🎉
#2 New Cards Day Likely to Happen Early 🎴
The first of every month is usually when we get about a dozen or so new shiny cards to collect. But since pack opening has surged, the availability of cards themselves has been threatened! A good problem to have. 😊
🚨 While April 1st is only about a week away, expect the new cards to drop earlier than that! 🚨
#3 RS Streamer Momentum Builds 📺
Check it out! 👇
Four streamers online for Rising Star at the same time. May not seem like much, but this is how things grow.
It was actually very close to five, as @sharmanhd had just shut down for the evening before @groovy828 came online:
We're talking mere minutes! Exciting times. Shoutout to streamers @rakhmen (Darth Wolf Gaming), @cmmndrbawang (cmmndrgarlic) and @snarkymouse for taking the time and effort to stream about Rising Star!
#4 Clove eyes the RS podium 🏅
After a few short weeks of getting to know Buskeria, @clove71 has stormed into the Top 10!
She's opened over 5,000 packs and scooped up a lot of cards from the market (she's at least one of those elusive twelve L7 John trades...), injecting a whole bunch of value and excitement into the ecosystem. Could her splash be what's instigated the STARBITS price rally? Hard to say!
She is now only about 1,300 points away from snagging the longstanding 3rd place held by @musicuniversity. His game-leading stash of 686 unique cards fends off clove's sheer volume... for now!
The next hurdle to surpass @paleshelter will be much harder. clove would have to effectively double her collection... and no doubt paleshelter will see that coming.
I'm not really worried about @foxon being unseated any time soon, with nearly 4x clove's points. But crazier things have happened! From what she's said in the RS Discord, it doesn't look like her aim is to be in the #1 spot. Like most of us, she's in it for the game itself!
#5 STARBITS flirt with soft peg price 📈
Likely due to this surge of new users, the price of STARBITS has rallied.
The "soft peg" for STARBITS is 0.0004 SWAP.HIVE, and we have watched it get closer and closer to this point in the past weeks.
🤔 What does this mean?
- The cost of one pack is 4 SWAP.HIVE or 10,000 STARBITS.
- Twelve packs are 40 SWAP.HIVE or 100,000 STARBITS.
In a perfectly efficient world, the cost of a thing should be the same no matter what currency you use to pay for it. In this perfect world, 1 STARBIT should = exactly 0.0004 SWAP.HIVE as determined by the stated and static prices of the packs.
But this isn't a perfect world, and the supply/demand of STARBITS is messy, the price of HIVE and SWAP.HIVE and USD and HBD all fluctuate. People make decisions and choose to sell STARBITS for less (or more!) than 0.0004 SWAP.HIVE, etc.
We call it a "soft" peg because of this wonkiness. Nothing actually forces the price to be anything other than market decisions. A "hard" peg involves mechanisms and operations that try hard to keep a price relationship stable (e.g. HBD is more hard-pegged to USD, but a stablecoin like USDC to USD has an even "harder" peg).
If STARBITS do indeed start to stabilize around this soft peg price, it's a possible signal that the game economy is in a robust and healthy place and that the market "thinks" the price per pack is fair. It's a much better thing than if STARBITS price was crazy volatile.
#6 Over six thousand active players! 🎊🎉🥳
Navigate to the end of the Active Player list (here's how to do that without needing to click dozens of NEXT buttons) and you'll see:
6,106 active players! This list only picks up people who've logged activity in the past 7 days.
Almost exactly a month ago, the max page was the 5,000–5,100 page. Here we are at 6,100–6,200. Call it an even 5K to 6K growth, and that's 20% from last month.
If RSG maintains 20% month over month growth for the next year, in March 2023 the active user accounts will be over 44,000 😵
Listen @bmj4330, @kennedyleon3, @bvijay, @iu1314, @robe9307 and @opasph—I know that it looks like a long way up, but by this time next year you could easily be top 10%! Let's gooooo!