Two major news items worth analyzing have arrived in Splinterlands, both related to the game's governance token, SPS. The first is that @dalz added a page to his HBDStats website dedicated to tracking SPS and DEC tokens, while the second is something that will impact the token's supply: the addition of a mechanism to burn rewards in order to earn more glint. To date, over 160,000 SPS tokens have already been burned by players to obtain a larger amount of Glint as a reward. The impression is that to access Glint, players need to stake SPS or even burn it, so indirectly, more demand for Glint means a greater demand for SPS.
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SPS Supply
Regarding SPS, for those who don't know, it's the governance and utility token of Splinterlands. After the recent drop in Bitcoin and the end of sales of the new game collection, the token's price has fallen considerably. In the last month alone, it has already fallen by 25%, but when compared to other cryptocurrencies higher up in the ranking on Coinmarketcap itself, the drop was still relatively low. Regarding the supply, the maximum would be 3 billion tokens, but with the burning that has already occurred, the total supply today is 2.75 billion. We will see below that with the implementation of more token burning mechanisms, it is possible that the supply will be reduced even further, and in the future, if there is a new influx of players, there may even be a shortage of SPS for everyone.
SPS Reward Burning
A new mechanic for burning SPS has been implemented in a recent Splinterlands update, allowing players to automatically burn their SPS rewards in Silver+ ranks in both Modern and Wild Formats, thereby increasing their amount of GLINT received. According to the patch notes, enabling this function on the game's rewards page, "Burn SPS For Glint," will double the reward shares in the Glint calculation. I had already mentioned that it was becoming more difficult to evolve cards since the costs increased, and now there's this new function, I just don't know yet if it's worth making this trade...
Regarding the amount of SPS that have been burned, it has already exceeded 160,000 tokens in a short time. In the Wild Format SPS Reward Burning Leaderboard, over 103,000 SPS tokens have been burned. Meanwhile, in the Modern Format Leaderboard, over 60,000 tokens have already been burned. This means that players in both formats are confident that this exchange of SPS for Glint is working for them and are burning their Glint rewards, causing the supply of SPS to decrease as this "tap" dwindles.
With this recent change allowing SPS rewards to be burned for extra glint, the supply of SPS will continue to decrease over time, making the token increasingly scarce. In a short time after the launch, more than 160,000 SPS tokens were burned, a value close to $1,000, further reducing the amount of tokens available. According to the SPS burned graph so far, we can observe that the amount of SPS burned has been slowly increasing, gradually "eating" the token's supply. Now, with this change, this line tends to incline slightly upwards, due to this new token burning mechanism.
Since the SPS supply is limited, these constant burns tend to cause the token to suffer the economic effects of the law of supply, where when there is less of a product available on the market, it tends to appreciate. However, for this to happen, there needs to be sufficient demand to drive prices upwards, something that has been somewhat lacking in Splinterlands. Recently, there was a visual upgrade and improvements to the game's UI/UX, but this has not yet been reflected in new users.
