🧠 The Fallacy of Engagement-as-Value
It’s painful to watch Splinterlands leadership celebrate “record engagement” while SPS and DEC prices keep sliding.
The assumption seems obvious to them:
More engagement → more demand → higher prices.
But it’s dead wrong.
⚖️ Not All Engagement Creates Value
There’s value-positive engagement, and there’s value-negative engagement.
| Engagement Type | Examples | Token Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Sink-Driven | Buying packs, renting cards, staking SPS, upgrading NFTs | 🔥 Reduces circulating supply → supports price |
| Emission-Driven | Farming rewards, grinding Frontier, dumping tokens | 💧 Increases circulating supply → suppresses price |
When engagement growth comes mostly from emission-driven loops,
the system inflates itself to death.
More “activity” just means more supply, not more demand.
🤖 Anti-Bot ≠ Anti-Inflation
Banning bots doesn’t fix the economy.
The issue isn’t automation — it’s motivation.
Even human players can behave like bots when ROI-chasing is the only rational play.
The blockchain doesn’t care if the wallet is human or scripted;
sell pressure looks identical on-chain.
🔁 The Right vs. Wrong Causal Chain
The company should be measuring this:
✅ High-quality engagement → more sinks → lower supply → higher prices → stronger incentive loop.
Instead, they’re optimizing for this:
❌ More total engagement → more emission → higher supply → lower prices → weaker incentive loop.
🔥 Entropy Masquerading as Growth
What they’re celebrating isn’t economic health —
it’s token entropy disguised as engagement.
Until the company stops mistaking kinetic noise for stored value,
prices will keep saying what dashboards won’t:
💬 “You’re counting the wrong thing.”
❓A Final Question for the Reader
How many more months of SPS and DEC downward price pressure —
not counting the brief spikes from new card editions or promo events —
will it take before we admit that the regression-to-mean keeps sliding lower each cycle?
Each “bounce” fades faster than the last.
Each event spike returns to a weaker baseline.
At what point do we finally see that an increasing count of daily users doesn’t help
when most of that engagement just mints more inflation instead of value?
