Just about a year ago (I honestly don't remember how long), a play to earn game came out on the market that allowed you to stake your existing NFTs to earn a token called Aether. At the time, Aether had not much value at all, but I think we all know how quickly tokens can do a 180 and surprise us, so I went ahead and staked a lot of my assets.
Over time, I started earning more and more Aether in RPlanet. Eventually, I had a pretty nice stack. Then RPlanet finally launched some NFTs of their own called "rigs" and they implemented some game crafting game play that garnered players Fungible and Non Fungible tokens. It was pretty awesome. I was generating Aether every hour, selling it on the market every day or every other day and pumping that profit back into other NFT projects or CUB Finance. Things were great!
It soon became apparent (to pretty much everyone) that the max supply of Aether was much too high. People were generating it at a crazy pace and even the introduction of lands and robots to help burn that Aether didn't really put a dent in the fact that people were creating so much.
Many of us sadly watched as the price of Aether inched closer and closer to oblivion. We continued to keep our NFTs staked, but we had a pretty good idea where the game was heading and most of the people I know had written it off as a loss.
To be fair, I now understand a little better the thinking of the dev team in making the supply of Aether so high. They built a whole crafting model that they knew would require a lot of Aether to generate the elements. They just miscalculated and maybe underestimated the amount of people who would be interested in participating.
That's why many of us were kind of shocked a couple of weeks ago when RPlanet announced that that they were making some major overhauls to the game. Shocked, but skeptical. There was a small sliver of hope in the back of our minds that this might be the thing to turn Aether around and make it all worth it again.
I am currently sitting on about 200m Aether, but I know people who generate close to that much per hour. They are literally sitting on billions and this could be a big deal for them.
Ch ch ch ch ch ch changes...
One of the first things they proposed was the introduction of a token called RDAO. This token would be a governance (and believe it or not DAO) token that in the future will give holders voting rights and also some passive income equating to 75% of the profits from all transactions on the marketplace or something like that.
They airdropped about 24 of these tokens to some of the most active members of the community. Which basically means people who actually did some crafting and didn't just stake their NFTs and walk away. I was lucky enough to snag some of these tokens. I also jumped on Alcor and swapped into a bunch more of the RDAO tokens at around 4 WAX or less per token.
I love the idea of passive income and I wanted to take advantage of the people dumping the token, so I picked up about another 450 of them. I see now that the swap price of RDAO is 9 WAX, so it was already a pretty decent move on my part.
In the past, RPlanet had a kind of loose approval process for projects to get listed allowing users to stake their NFTs to earn Aether. With the latest updates, users will now get the chance to vote on the top 21 projects that they want to reward Aether for staking. Think of it similar to the witness system we have here on Hive. You have to stake some Aether to move your favorite project(s) further up the list.
It is a good start towards locking up some of that Aether that is out there. They also made some changes to the staking system over-all.
The RPlanet mining rigs will still generate the same amount of Aether per hour they always did. The RPlanet elements, took a huge nerf. The implemented some new uses for those elements because of the nerf, but I will get to that in a little bit.
They also instituted limits on claiming your Aether. In the past, you could leave the game for weeks, come back, and claim millions (or more) of Aether. Now they have limited it to 10k Aether per hour that you can claim. You can burn Aether to raise your claim limit, but that is on a degrading scale losing 1% per hour until it falls back to 10k.
If you look at the image above, you can see that my current mining power is just about 38k per hour. I burned 1 million Aether and that moved me up to about 900k per hour that I could claim. After a day or so I am now down to 600k per hour that I can claim. Eventually, it will fall back to 10k per hour and I will need to burn more Aether to raise that limit. If I don't raise my limit and I am sitting at 10k, but I try to claim 100k, I will only get 10k and the other 90k will be burned.
You can see already that they have taken some aggressive measures to start the burn process of Aether.
Remember those elements I talked about earlier? Well now you have the choice to either keep them with the significantly nerfed Aether/hour numbers or, you can burn them into a token called APH (Ather per hour) that you can use in the new auction system to bid on RDAO tokens. You are also allowed to bid Aether for RDAO tokens. They are doing one auction per day for the next 150 days or so until the 1.5m (or something like that) supply of RDAO is gone.
The cool thing is, if you burn your elements now, you get the old Aether/hour value not the new nerfed one. Unless you have a ton of really high value elements, it makes a lot of sense to just burn them.
As you can see from the image above, on day 1 I bid 361 of the APH token and I received .64 RDAO tokens. Not really that great. It makes me feel better about getting those RDAO tokens via the swap market because they are likely going to be difficult to get on the auction. Especially with so much Aether out there to be burned.
If you look a little closer, you can see that on day 2 (which ends at 11 AM EST today), I made a bid to burn 7m Aether and 1000 APH and I am currently looking at receiving 6.6 and 2.2 RDAO tokens respectively. I am likely going to wait until day 15 or so and dump a big chunk of my stuff in hoping that most people will either have forgotten about it or already gotten all of their RDAO and I might have some better luck in the auction.
Finally, the last piece of the puzzle that they have implemented (so far) is a section called "Metafarming". This is the section that has me really happy I swapped into those RDAO tokens after they were airdropped.
If you look really closely, you can see that I have 400 RDAO tokens staked to the first farm. Based on that stake, I have already earned just about 60 WAX over the past day. With WAX being at $.34 right now, you might not think that is all that great. You would probably be right, but... I still feel like the WAX token is grossly undervalued. I think it is a $1 plus token easy. Especially given the number of projects and the amount of stuff that is being created there on a daily basis. Add to that the fact that WAX carries more NFT volume than all of the other chains combined and I think you will agree that any WAX you can get your hands on now will pay off down the road.
If you look a little to the right, you can see there are some other tokens in the BOX family that you can stake to earn RDAO tokens. I might have to look into picking up some of those and doing some staking. In addition to that, there are also some liquidity pools you can jump into on a third party site that will earn you RDAO. I don't remember the name and given the possibility of impermanent loss, I am not sure I want to mess around with those right now.
In Closing
It is pretty clear that RPlanet has taken some pretty aggressive measures to reduce the supply of Aether in the market. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention they also cut the max supply of Aether by a pretty significant amount. Nothing major, just dropping it from the quadrillion range down to the trillion range or something like that. No big deal!
If you jump on the RPlanet Telegram channel, you will likely see a lot of people upset about the nerfs. Personally, I think those people are being short sighted. I get there are some people who invested a lot of their funds into this game and having their assets get nerfed is never a fun thing. On the other hand, they knew they were taking the gamble when they got in. Everything in this space is kind of that way right now, we are still so early.
If they didn't take the gains when the opportunity was there, that is on them and them alone, not on the developers. For all intents and purposes, this game was dead. The fact that the devs care so much about it they are willing to take these drastic measures to resurrect it gives me a glimmer of hope.
There could be some huge things on the horizon for RPlanet. If you wrote it off, I would definitely give it a second look now!
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