Wow, what a week! With the launch of Splintershards (SPS), Splinterlands has finally started to really take off and has grown at an unbelievable rate - pretty much smashing all of the metrics we track off the charts!
Of course, with that kind of growth has also come some growing pains, and the Splinterlands dev team has been working nearly around the clock over the past week to upgrade servers, optimize the code, and fix issues.
We want to sincerely apologize to any players who experienced issues over the past week and we want to ensure everyone that we are working on implementing much more scalable and robust systems to handle not only the current level of growth, but significantly more than that going forward.
In-Game SPS Staking Rewards
Rewards for SPS staked in-game are scheduled to start at Hive block 56,186,000 which should be roughly around 12 - 1 PM ET / 16:00 - 17:00 UTC tomorrow, August 2nd, 2021.
The rewards will come from the "SPS Staking Rewards" pool and will begin at 7,500,000 SPS tokens per month (decreasing at 1% per month thereafter) as described in the SPS whitepaper here: https://sps.splinterlands.com/rewards.
These tokens will be distributed among all players who have SPS tokens staked in their accounts in game in proportion to the amount of SPS they have staked compared to the total.
The SPS staking rewards will work very similarly to the staking rewards in many existing defi platforms, such as CubDefi, where the rewards will accumulate in players' accounts with each Hive block that is produced and can be claimed at any time. Additionally, only SPS tokens held in a Splinterlands game account can be staked in the game. Any tokens held in external wallets or platforms like Binance Smart Chain will first need to be transferred into the game in order to be staked.
As a quick example, if there are a total of 10M SPS tokens staked, and you have personally staked 100k SPS tokens in your account, then you will receive 1% (100k / 10M) of the SPS staking rewards pool, which comes to about 0.856 SPS per Hive block (every 3 seconds roughly), or 75k SPS for the first month.
Players do not have to do anything other than stake SPS tokens to earn the rewards initially, however, in the future when the player staking feature is implemented then the staked SPS tokens will be required to be allocated to specific Splinterlands players in order to be able to earn staking rewards as described in the SPS whitepaper here: https://sps.splinterlands.com/rewards/ranked-battles
More information will be released about the player staking well in advance of the feature going live, and it will not be necessary to unstake your SPS tokens to take part in that.
Additional In-Game SPS Rewards
We had initially been hoping to be able to also release the SPS Ranked battle and tournament rewards this coming week along with the staking rewards, however due to the shifting of focus of the development team to scaling and dealing with issues over the past week those are not ready quite yet.
While ensuring that the game can scale to comfortably handle many times the size of the current userbase is still our top priority, we also hope to be able to get the additional in-game SPS reward pools up and running as soon as possible.
Card Cooldown Time Reduction
Starting later this coming week (barring any additional issues that may alter priorities) we plan to reduce the cooldown time for cards that have been transferred or sold and recently played in battles from the current 7 days to 24 hours.
In order to help prevent the exploits that the 7-day cooldown period was meant to address, the season reward loot chests will be changed to be based on each player's current league at the end of the season rather than their highest league achieved during the season. This change will take effect for the current ranked play season which ends on August 15th.
We hope that this change should help alleviate much of the confusion and frustration that players (especially newer players) have around the cooldown system while also still preventing the majority of the exploits that were previously possible when the system was first implemented.
Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!
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NOTE: All rewards from this post will be burned.