DEC and SPS - what is for what and how to swap - a thorough guide.

This is part of the Community Engagement Challenge: https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterlands/splinterlands-community-engagement-challenge-tutorials-and-tips-from-the-community-spujdg

Prologue

SPS and DEC are the two most important tokens in Splinterlands. While SPS is the governance token (meaning you can partake in the decision-making based on that token) and the main "payment" for gaming, DEC is the currency for trading cards, buying items, unbinding reward cards, buying land and such.

How to earn them

SPS are relatively easy to come by - you can win them in ranked battles, brawls, tournaments or as a reward for staking the SPS you already have. Staking the provides you as well with more benefits, for example higher SPS and Glint earnings in ranked battles, and your vote as a little more weight when it comes to governance. There are other sources like liquidity pools and nods, but that's something for later in the game.

DEC is not that easy. There is no "natural" source of DEC. You can get it by selling or renting cards, or by buying them directly via FIAT, Crypto - or by burning SPS.

For me personally, I got quite a bit of my DEC while I was building my deck - I was using https://monstercards.store/ to buy my cards, and that market gives back a percentage of the trading fees to your account.

But let's focus on getting DEC from SPS here as a way to grow organically based on the progress you make in the game.

DEC - Page

Let's go to our DEC-Page by clicking on the DEC counter in the upper right corner of your Splinterlands-Browser-Window.

As you can see, there are a few panels to click on - please click first on the "Read about DEC" in order to get a basic info about it, or Click here for the link.

As you can see, I currently have 18,600 DEC, of which 18,500 is bound in Land in form of Dark Energy, and 100 DEC are liquid. This panel doesn't show the DEC that I have in Grain- and Voucherpools, though.

Get DEC

If you click on the green "Get DEC" Button, you will be led to this page:

Now, we do not want to bring any outside-money in this time, so for curiosity we click on "SPS - Burn SPS to get DEC" and arrive here:

I went ahead and put in the 45 SPS that I just won in a Tournament and confirmed - but immediatly, a very important red writing pops up, stating that it is way better for me to not burn SPS, but rather swap it on a third party exchange - thank you, @splinterlands for that feature! This will probably always happen until DEC rises up to around 0,1 cent per DEC.

What now?

Now, we go to the Hive Engine. This is one of the "Third Party Exchanges" on the hive-ecosystem, and the one that I'm used to - but there are a few others, you can try around and find the one you like. Since you have a Splinterlands-Account, you also have a Hive-Account - very practical.

When you click on Wallet, you see all your token-positions. If you post a lot on your Hive-Blog and get rewards, you will see a lot of different tokens that you'll probably never learn the purpose of, but that's okay - we're here for SPS and DEC, those we know.

Now, we need to get our SPS into our Hive Wallet. Go back to Splinterlands, click on the SPS-Amount (like the DEC before) to get to the SPS-Control panel.

As you can see, my 45 SPS are liquid and In-Game. I want them to be on the HIVE-Engine - luckily, that is very, very easy. Just click on Transfer.

In this page (mind the cool background), change the "To" part to "Hive Engine" and click max or enter the amount you want to transfer. Then click transfer and a minute later the SPS is out of your Splinterlands, and in your Hive-Engine-Wallet (after confirming the pop-ups).

THE SWAP

Back to Hive engine! The SPS arrived savely and without losses 🤑

Now, there are two ways. One is the complicated one - you can sell the SPS and then buy the DEC manually, which might bring you 1 or 2 DEC more, but I prefer to use the SWAP function. For that, Click on the "Swap"-Button on the upper side of your Hive-Engine-Site. A pop-up will tell you that you're in the right place:

In the "From" part, enter SPS. In the "To" part, DEC. Then enter the amount of SPS that you want to swap (you have to do that manually, there is no "max" button - yet, maybe it will be implemented in the future?). The engine will automatically calculate how much DEC you will receive - more or less. As you can see in the example below, according to the engine, I might loose $0,0047 of value in this swap. Fine by me, my time is worth more than that.

Click "Swap", confirm the Keychain-Pop-Up (or whatever you use to confirm), and wait a little. You'll be redirected to the "Swaps"-Page, stating that your swap is in progress. As you can see, I'm swapping quite a lot of SPS for DEC lately since I arrived at my SPS-Stake-Goal and am now working on goals that require DEC:

In the time I wrote the last sentences and copied the picture, the swap is already done and the DEC is in my Hive-Engine-Wallet:

Funny enough, I actually got 4 more DEC than anticipated - isn't that great? I'm happy. Let's go back to our DEC page in Splinterlands.

Back into the game!

The DEC in the HIVE-Wallet is now displayed here:

We click on "Transfer" and do the same that we did with SPS - just the other way around. From Hive Wallet to Ingame, max amount.

Again, please mind the awesome background. Click on "Transfer", confirm the Pop-Up, and after a couple of minutes the SPS converted to DEC is in our Splinterlands account and ready to be used:

Epilogue

Contratulations, you did your first SPS-DEC swap! It works the other way around, too, in case you want to sell old cards and stake more SPS. The Hive-Engine is a wonderfully easy tool to use and trade around your Splinterlands-Assets, although it's a lot more rudimentary then other Swaps that are a little more fancy - but I like the straight-forward-approach. As mentioned, you can use other Swaps as well, there are quite a few out there.

If you don't need your DEC right away, I recommend storing it in the @spltrader pool - you can take it out whenever you need it, and get some returns while it's in the pool.

The trading-tool is also very interesting, but I'm still figuring that out. Probably going to be another post for another day.

Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!

If you don't play the game yet, you can use my referral: Click here for referral :-)