My SPS Investment Journey - Bearish On SPS?

Hello! It's my periodic/monthly update and self-talk about my SPS investment journey.

My last post was on 18 March, you can check it out here.

Since then, the price of SPS has been on a freefall, from 0.0244 since a month ago to the current price of 0.0140.

There has not been any major changes with regard to SPS token itself, but here's my thoughts about Splinterlands:

• Too many changes within a short period of time, while it's done in the interest of players, it's a lot of hassle to learn, and re-learn, strategise, and re-strategise for existing players, and that's kinda frustrating.
• The removal of chest rewards from the new format seems to have done more harm than good. In the past, I used to look forward to opening a long list of chests at EOS, nowadays, it just feels like another day. The excitement is lost.
• Removal of mobile app function was not welcome for quite a number of players, including myself, who play the game on the go and might not have access to a full laptop browser all the time.
• Too much politics and squabbling going on for those proposals. We had proposals voted down, then resurfaced, and the cycle repeats.
• Don't get me started on the halving event...

All in all, if I could be honest here, Splinterlands is an awesome card game in itself, and that's why I have been playing over 16,000 battles (zero botting) for the past 2.5 years...

But everything outside the game itself is kinda disappointing.. And I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way. Looks at the number of the battles and the number of active players over the past 3 months. The declining trend looks worse if you zoom out to 6 months or longer. One can't deny that the game is losing popularity, even among existing players. And of course, this is all reflected in the price movement of SPS.

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My SPS Investment

As background, 4 months ago, I decided to swap 600 HBD into 19,162 SPS because of my bullishness for the price of SPS. You can find this being mentioned in a few posts of mine. And this is kept and monitored separately from the SPS that I get from playing Splinterlands.

At this point, I am not even bullish about SPS itself, but there's still ways to salvage the situation, while we wait for the crypto bull market to arrive (assuming it does?).

As shared in my previous posts, one can earn yield from staking SPS (to get SPS and VOUCHER) and renting out the SPS (to get DEC).

From staking SPS and renting out staked SPS, I have accumulated a total of 796 SPS so far over these 4 months. With that, my initial purchase of 19,162 SPS has become 19,958 SPS.

	SPS Earned	Comments
Staking SPS (SPS)	431
Staking SPS (VOUCHER)	85	Converted from VOUCHER to SPS
Renting out SPS	280	Converted from DEC to SPS
Total	796

Putting them in a table, it's clear that the current value is in the red due to the price difference, but it's also clear that the extra SPS from staking SPS have reduced the margins.

	SPS	Price of SPS (in USD)	Total Value (in USD)
Cost as of 14 Dec 2023	19,162	0.0313	600.00
Value as of 28 Apr 2024	19,162	0.0140	268.27
Profit/Loss			-331.73
Value as of 28 Apr 2024 (with Yield)	19,958	0.0140	279.41
Profit/Loss			-320.59

To conclude, I am not so bullish on SPS at this juncture, but am adopting a wait and see approach. In the mean time, my focus is on maximising the yield first.

Before I end, of course, I should always reiterate that this is not financial advice. This is just my personal viewpoint and one should ALWAYS do your own due diligence for anything you want to put your money in.

So what do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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If you are interested to sign up to play Splinterlands, my referral link is here.