Today we have had to make the extremely difficult decision to reduce the size of the Splinterlands team by roughly 45%. Before anyone asks - no, we did not have any funds in FTX or any other at-risk exchanges or services, nor do we have any debt or use leverage in any way.
The company had built up a long runway of funds in a combination of cash and crypto, and we used those funds throughout the year to build out our roadmap. Unfortunately, the continually weakening cryptocurrency market - in addition to the broader markets - was a double-whammy for our business. Not only did the value of our cryptocurrency holdings decrease, shortening our available runway, but also the amount of revenue that the business could bring in dropped as our community also felt the effects of the falling markets.
With the recent, incredibly disheartening events occurring in the crypto industry, it is clear that this market weakness may be far worse and last for far longer than all of us had hoped, and that Splinterlands needed to take action to ensure that we can make it through a prolonged downturn and still be in a position to lead the industry on the other end.
Focus on Delivering
Going forward, the Splinterlands team will be 100% focused on one thing - delivering on our promises to the community. There will be no new games or presales for the foreseeable future. Despite having a smaller team, we believe we can be much more efficient through being laser focused on delivering value to the community - our most important asset.
We will be working on an updated roadmap for the organization for 2023 that we plan to release before the end of the year, and we expect that it will (at least) contain the following items:
- LAND
- Runi
- Tower Defense
- Rebellion
- SPS Validator Nodes
- New Player Experience (new)
- Gameplay & Reward Updates (new - to help address advantages gained by bots at both high and low leagues, among other things)
- DEC & Voucher Sinks
- Genesis League: Goals
Through this restructuring of the company, accompanied by a planned capital raise, we can put ourselves in a position where we don't need to worry about running out of runway and we can instead focus on executing on the above roadmap, which we believe will bring immense value into this ecosystem and to the community over the long term.
To Our Community
We recognize that in the crypto/blockchain/web3 space, community is not just important - it is the heart and soul of these projects, and Splinterlands is no exception. We know that what got us here, and what will eventually propel the project to new heights in the future, is everyone reading this message. What makes the community so much more important in web3 projects than in traditional projects is asset ownership. Asset ownership creates a much closer connection between company and customers, and even customers to other customers. We are all in this together and we're going to work together to get through it.
Some people may see this as a reason to sell their assets and move on. As much as we hate to see anyone go, we also celebrate the fact that they owned assets which they are free to sell when they wish. For everyone else, we believe this marks a new beginning for Splinterlands. With these changes we have positioned the organizion to ride out a long and protracted bear market and/or global recession while at the same time continuing to build out our products and delivering value for our community.
Finally, we are planning to have a Town Hall call with the community at 6:00 PM ET / 23:00 UTC today, Thursday, November 17th, in the Splinterlands Discord server, where we can talk through the changes and the vision for the future in more detail and answer questions. We hope to see you there.