The Splinterlands team is planning to introduce a 1 DEC or 1 Credit fee for all new listings and price updates on the Splinterlands card sales and rental markets, as well as adding a 30 day expiration time to both new and existing listings. These changes are currently planned to be released on Tuesday, March 7th, 2023, during the normal maintenance window, and they will require updates for third-party tools and services that perform these operations (more details below).
These changes are necessary to help reduce our internal server costs and to ensure that our services can continue to run smoothly without lagging or falling behind (many players may have noticed that this has been an issue lately, especially with the rental market). These changes are just one part of a much larger overall project to reduce costs and ensure that our services can continue to scale up far into the future and handle the anticipated growth.
For some context, the Splinterlands servers have to process millions of market listings and updates every day and they need to index, cache, and update the data in near real-time to support not only our internal market on the Splinterlands website, but also all of the other third-party markets and services that are part of the ecosystem.
By adding this relatively small fee and having listings that are not sold or rented expire, we can very significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be indexed and made available as well as reduce the volume of transactions that need to be processed, which can drastically reduce our operating costs and allow the system to scale up to support a much larger player base in the future.
As with all such changes, the fee and the expiration time are subject to change in the future. We will be closely monitoring the effects of these changes, both on our servers and on the overall markets, to make sure that everything is working as intended and see if any adjustments are necessary.
Listing Fee
As mentioned above, the fee for the relevant transactions will be 1 DEC or 1 Credit token, and it will be charged per listing that is added or updated on the market and not per blockchain operation. We feel that this fee is small enough to be insignificant to most players while still encouraging users and automated tools to be more thoughtful about the amount of these operations that they send.
All DEC tokens spent on listing fees will be burned and the market within the Splinterlands website will automatically use DEC for the listing fee unless the player does not have enough DEC, in which case it will fall back to using Credits. Third party markets are encouraged to clearly message the new listing fees on their websites.
Please note that for rental listings, the fee will only be charged once when the card is listed, and that card can be rented indefinitely without paying the fee again until the card is cancelled by the owner or the price is updated.
Finally, please note that even though rental listing actions will now have a payment component, the posting key will still be able to be used for these transactions. There are many popular rental services which work using posting keys and we do not want to break those considering this is a very low-risk situation. Going forward, however, we do highly encourage third-party rental services to use the rental authority feature instead of requiring users to provide their posting keys.
Listing Expiration
In addition to the listing fee, all sale and rental market listings will also have a 30 day expiration time. New market listings will expire 30 days from when they are first listed, and existing listings will be set to expire in 30 days from the date of this change being released.
Rental market listings will only expire if they have not been rented at all for 30 days. Any time a rental ends and the card goes back on the rental market the 30 day expiration timer will reset.
When a market listing expires, the card will be automatically removed from the market and will need to be re-listed and the listing fee will need to be paid again.
Technical Details
Two new parameters list_fee and list_fee_token will need to be added to all of the affected operations listed below in order to acknowledge the new fee. Operations from the list that do not include the new parameter will fail, which will ensure that any bots or tools that are not updated will not be charged a fee that they were not expecting.
New parameters:
list_feea valid float which is equal to thelist_fee_per_card(see below) times the number of cards in the operation.list_fee_tokenmust be either "DEC" or "CREDITS". At the time of this writing, the Splinterlands UI will select DEC by default. If the player does not have enough DEC, then it will attempt to use CREDITS and fail should they not have enough.
To calculate the list_fee you will need to fetch the list_fee_per_listing obtained from json of the https://api2.splinterlands.com/settings endpoint. If the list_fee_per_listing is not defined or 0, then the list_fee is disabled. Example of the result:
{
"list_fee_per_listing": 1
}
With the list_fee_per_listing you can calculate the total list_fee by multiplying the number of market listings in the operation by list_fee_per_listing. For example, assume list_fee_per_listing is 1 and you have 2 cards being listed in the operation, then list_fee must be set to exactly 2 which is (1 x 2 = 2).
Please note that sets/packages of cards only count as one listing, and will only have to pay the list_fee_per_listing cost once per set/package.
The list of operations that will need to be updated with the new parameter are:
- sm_sell_cards
- sm_update_price
- sm_update_rental_price
- sm_market_list
The format of the new parameter should be as follows:
{
// other params for the operation...
"list_fee": 1,
"list_fee_token": "DEC"
}
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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