So it's been almost 48 hours since land got released. We still have a few minor issues with stability and lag but overall, I'd say the release was pretty successful from a technical point of view. After the mega lag of the first maybe 20-30 minutes people started to set up their plots and explore everything that the land expansion has to offer.
Looking around on Discord and especially on some of the content creators Youtube videos, there seems to be the impression that land is up to a pretty slow start. Personally, I really don't think that's the case, though. It seems like people expected 20% or even 30% of land utilization right out of the box. Frankly, I think these expectations were pretty unrealistic from the get go.
Even before the Rebellion pre sale there were only a handful of whales that had both the DEC and the cards necessary to work their whole region(s). Now that Rebellion ate a lot of that DEC, we are down to very few people that really could afford to power all their lands. Even if they can, though, setting up your plots is a lot of work, especially if you want to do it in the most ideal way and thus can't use an automatization tool for it. @cryptomancer for example, who was one of the top holders both in terms of plots and DEC only managed to set up about 300 plots as of a few hours ago.
The theoretical full utilization of land would be 7.5B DEC - 10k DEC per worker with 5 workers per plot. The actual number is a bit lower because plots that have a Runi staked don't need to have DEC staked to operate, but to keep things simple, that's the number I'll go with. Over on Splintercards we have a distribution monitor for DEC which also tracks how much DEC is staked to land already:
So right now, we are pretty close to 10% of the theoretical maximum of DEC already staked on plots. After 48 hours, I'd say that's a pretty good number already. Also keep in mind that this would imply that all plots always have max level monsters staked to them which I can guarantee you is not the case. My highest PP monster overall happens to be a single BCX gold foil Spirit Miner - the first Gold Foil Legendary I ever found in a chest:
I expect this number to go up at a steady pace for a bit more as people finish setting up their plots. Also some people probably just wanted to wait for a few days to see if everything runs stable and/or only have time on the weekend to spend several hours on managing their plots. After that, though, I expect things to slow down a bit. But that's not only totally fine, but also fully in line with what I think Land 1.5 is meant to do. Short term, there are two important functions to Land 1.5, at least in my opinion:
- Stop the distribution of "free" SPS to land holders
- Lock up value within the ecosystem
The first point actually is a lot more important than what people give it credit for. If you held land ever since the initial sale, you've earned a crazy amount of SPS for it by now:
I obviously don't have exact numbers, but I'd say that about one million of my total SPS balance came from my region, either during the initial airdrop or from the land specific airdrop we got afterwards. Now I obviously can only talk for myself here, but that steady stream of SPS has made me a bit lazy in terms of getting more SPS. Of course I've still played the game every day, I've accumulated SPS from ranked play, tournaments, the staking rewards, and I still religiously claim my rewards way more often than it really makes sense. But at the same time, it made me pretty pleased with the amount of SPS that I have. Of course I always would want to have more, but when you earn close to 2,000 SPS a day without any effort, you are a lot less likely to put in the extra effort to earn just a fraction of that in other areas of the game.
It's also the reason why I don't really care about farming SPS much right now. While I do have some shard mines set up, I certainly would have aped in way more if this was the first time that my lands actually paid any dividends.
Getting rid of that free airdrop will help to value SPS a lot more again. That doesn't mean I'll start buying more tomorrow, but as I earn less and less SPS each day, I will be more and more inclined to actually make another push to increase my daily SPS earning - and that's exactly what the ecosystem needs.
That also ties in perfectly with the 2nd function that Land 1.5 has to fulfill. It's all about locking up value within the ecosystem. Now there's the obvious first part of locking up the cards and DEC that we had saved up for the land release. But there's also a more subtle part behind that. I don't really consider myself a whale but even on my level, there are a lot of daily income streams within Splinterlands. I'm renting out cards, I'm renting out SPS, I'm earning SPS from tournaments, and, more recently, I'm selling my grain in OTC deals.
Now there are three options I have to deal with these income streams:
- Move them out of the ecosystem
- Keep them
- Spend them on something within the ecosystem
Sooner or later, the middle point will obviously lead to either moving it out or spending it on something as well. So far, spending it within the ecosystem was limited to buying more assets, either for use in battle or for speculation. With land, though, there's a completely new option available to me. Whenever I've accumulated another 50k DEC, I can now use that DEC to bring another plot online. This option is especially beneficial for the ecosystem, because not only am I spending my money within the game, but it's also not going to anybody else. It's effectively locked up for as long as I decide to run my land.
And that's the key aspect - the only reason I would unstake my DEC would probably be because I'm leaving the game... which is pretty unrealistic. So over time, I have 1,000 plots to bring online, which would translate to $50k worth of DEC locked up in the ecosystem just for me. I'm pretty sure I'm by far not the only whale/dolphin in this position and this alone should remove a lot of selling pressure both from DEC and our whole ecosystem, simply because a lot of money will be locked up instead of spent on something.
So to me personally, the release of land has been a huge success and things are really starting to look pretty promising again - we could be in for a lot of fun in the coming months and years!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!