About a month ago I've already mentioned that I was done with Splinterlands, mainly because the changes in the rules had made the game much less fun than it used to be, while the devs were occupied with some newly-hyped shit...
I sold almost all my cards and managed to do it before the massive dumping has begun. However, I decided to keep my lvl.2 gold-foil legendary Dark Ha'on, my only card with more or less meaningful value.
Instead of selling my Dark Ha'on I decided to rent it out at Peakmonsters. And here's some math I've got along the way.
Level 2 gold-foil legendaries are pretty expensive cards to rent. As far as I can see, their real rental fee is in the range of $0.01-0.1 By "real" I mean that there're cards actually rented at this price level, and "expensive" means that there're tons of lower-level cards put for rent at $0.001 (and I presume it's only because $0.001 is the minimum amount possible).
I've managed to rent my Dark Ha'on out for 14 days at $0.05, which is a pretty high fee.
Peakmonsters rental service has an "escrow" setting. Escrow should guard the lessor (the guy who rents out) and the lessee (the guy who pays the rent) against the breach of the rental contract. The escrowed amount is paid by the lessee. If both parties duly carry the contract out till the end, the escrowed amount gets divided between them (in other words, the lessee puts an amount at escrow, then pays rental fees daily, and then it's over he gets 50% of the escrowed amount back). If any party breaches the contract (terminates the rent earlier) -- the other party gets all the escrowed amount. However, in order to keep it simple, I didn't mess with escrow for my rental contract.
Peakmonsters takes a 5% cut on the rental fee. That is, in reality, my daily rental profit was $0.05-5% = $0.0475 So, had I managed to rent my Ha'on out for a year at that price, I would get the whole $0.0.475x365 = $17.3375!
Since I've got my Ha'on for free, my personal APY would be close to infinity in any case. Had I bought the card at the market for $50 (a very low price), my APY would be 17.3375/50x100 = 34.675% Not that bad at all! Even if we take a more realistic buy price like $70, the APY would still be close to 25%.
But here come some caveats, those little devils who dwell in details...
First, while the rental fee is quoted in USD, it's actually paid in Hive (and sometimes in HBD). When Hive price goes up against USD, you get less Hive. If it goes down, you get more Hive. However, it's not possible to convert Hive into USD (or any USD-pegged stablecoin, even HBD) instantly at Peakmonsters. You have to go to an exchange, and besides taking various commissions along the way, the most of exchanges have a pretty high min amount for trading stablecoins (i.e. at Binance the min lot is 10 USDT/PAX/etc). For my Dark Ha'on it will take 210 days at best to collect a $10 of Hive (10/0.0475), and the only God knows what the Hive price will be in 210 days... In other words, the real ROI is subject to Hive/USD volatility to a great extend.
Second, it's hard to have a card rented for the whole 365 days for the same price. There might be not enough renters. The rental prices might go down. And worst of all, after each rent the card goes into 6 days "cooldown" period. It still can be rented out during "cooldown", but the new lessee can't use it in battles, that pretty much diminishes its chances to be rented. If the min rental period is set to 7 days -- the card is at risk of staying idle every other period, at worst. On the other hand, if the min rental period is set to, say, 60 days -- there might be not that many people ready to rent the same card for two months.
I would estimate my Ha'on staying rented for 75% of the time (i.e. 274 days a year). In this case, I would earn like $13 -- 26% APY on a $50 investment or 18.5% APY on a $70 investment as per the assumptions above.
18% on USD is still not that bad, but as I said, it's actually subject to Hive/USD volatility, which I don't want even try to predict.
I'd say that for those who have a lot of high-level cards they got for free, Peakmonsters rental service could be beneficial. After all, it's better to have the cards earning something than staying idle. However, buying high-level cards only for renting out needs a good amount of DYORing beforehand.
Personally, I'm currently selling my card. But if it doesn't happen, in 4 days I will probably put it back to renting.