SPS Governance Proposal - Adjust the efficiency of rented and delegated SPS
Transaction ID: d5ddcca5f01574e68e6b06d2961dde01b4adde63
Hey everyone 👋
After all the great feedback and debate, this is the final and official version of the rented/delegated SPS efficiency that is now submitted for DAO vote.
It incorporates the community’s best ideas and represents a balanced, practical solution aimed at rebalancing incentives between renting and staking, without hurting accessibility or market stability.
🎯 Goal
Gradually reduce the efficiency of rented and delegated SPS in reward calculations —
to encourage staking, reduce sell pressure, and stabilize SPS value over time.
This is a lightweight, transparent, and predictable system designed to improve token health long-term.
⚙️ Why It’s Needed
SPS rentals are now extremely cheap (often 0.001 DEC).
Many players rent instead of owning, generating constant sell pressure.
Rewards are mostly extracted and sold rather than staked or held.
The result: weak price support and less alignment between players and the SPS ecosystem.
We don’t need to kill rentals — just rebalance them gradually so ownership and staking become the natural goal again.
💡 Core Mechanism
1️⃣ Delegation carve-out for new players
→ Delegated SPS keeps 100% efficiency for accounts under 3 months old, ensuring smooth onboarding.
2️⃣ Immediate 20% Decay
→ On implementation, all rented & delegated SPS start at 80% efficiency — a quick but balanced correction.
3️⃣ Unified tapering system
→ After that, both rented & delegated SPS decay together, ensuring fairness and avoiding loopholes.
4️⃣ 1% Weekly Decay: After implementation, the efficiency of rented and delegated SPS will decrease by 1% per week, calculated on the initial 80% efficiency, as per the tapering principle (i.e., the decay applies to the effective value, not to the full 100%).
For example:
Week 1 → 80.00% efficiency
Week 2 → 79.20% efficiency
Week 3 → 78.41% efficiency
Week 4 → 77.62% efficiency
Week 10 → 72.27% efficiency
Week 25 → 61.67% efficiencyS
5️⃣ Efficiency Floor at 50%
→ Efficiency stops decaying once it reaches 50%, keeping rentals viable but less competitive than staking.
📈 Expected Outcomes
✅ Lower sell pressure — less efficient farming = fewer SPS sold.
✅ Higher staking incentives — players shift from renting to owning.
✅ Smooth transition — no market shock, gradual and predictable.
✅ Fairness for new holders — new players keep full efficiency early on.
✅ DAO treasury benefit — supports long-term SPS circulation and value.
🛠️ Implementation
The system acts as a global efficiency multiplier on rewards — technically light and automated.
The DAO can later adjust the rate or cap if needed.
That said, the Splinterlands team will still review technical feasibility and dev impact before implementation,
to make sure this system is practical and not overly burdensome to build.
🧭 Conclusion
This proposal represents a measured evolution of the SPS economy — not a shock or a punishment, but a path forward shaped by the community itself.
Instead of sudden bans or drastic price floors, it offers a steady and predictable transition that rewards those who believe in the long-term vision of Splinterlands.
Starting with a 20% initial adjustment and a 1% weekly taper, players naturally move from renting to staking, strengthening the ecosystem one step at a time.
The result: a healthier, more resilient SPS economy — built on ownership, strategy, and shared commitment to the future of the game.
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STOPI will support this. I believe this proposal can eventually raise the price of Sps. But I do have concerns this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back for unhappy players. There are a lot people who are still frustrated with the loss of leagues, the constant DDoS attacks on Hive, and other problems. If you take away their cheap Sps then it could be enough to get them to quit. But losing players isn't always a bad thing. I think we are better off without the thousands of bronze bots, and there is no guarantee these players will stay even if you leave Sps rentals alone.
The impact on players will be minimal initially (20%) and everybody will have teh chance to slowly stake if they want to switch the approach. After one year the efficiency will be still higher than 50%. I think the transition will be very smooth. In any case I understand your fears. Thanks for the comment.
While I agree with the idea in principal I am voting against this. I believe it discourages new players from sticking around. In particular those who don't have a lot of money to throw at the game. There are already enough barriers for new players IMO. Perhaps if the decay rate was a lot slower for new players I would be more keen.
Yup it would make the game unplayable for genuine newbies.
Errrr I'm a new player and the only way to play is through rentals. If you put the price up it becomes a total waste of time. Why? Because you can't sell anything you currently get as a reward ....it's all soulbound. That means that buying anything is out of the question. You have credits and you have to be frugal with them. Add that to the ridiculousness of not being able to get archons in rewards for playing modern and you will make the game just unplayable for newbies.
Measured evolution? Who for? Not us newbies.
Hello there! Thanks for your feedback. As a new player, what is your goal? If it is to earn, a minimum of investment is required anywhere. Money are not created for free (I mean, unless you are a sovereign state). You have full 90 days waiver where you will enjoy 100%, after that, you have all the time to stake your SPS. What is your approach right now? How many SPS are you earning per season?
It's a game. I'd like to play it. I've already put money in it in order to play it. Are you suggesting that it is not a game and just an MLM in disguise? Coz if you are maybe you should consider not making shit-bag proposals that fuck-over us newbies in order to bleed us for cash.
I kindly ask you to discuss in a polite manner. Eventually, the intent, scope and extent of the proposal have not been clearly understood by yourself. As a new player, you will be merely pushed to stake instead of selling and you will have all the necessary time to do it without any impact. In the meantime the staked SPS should organically get value and so your stake. Therefore, please do not put in my mouth thoughts or words I never said.
Polite manner? If behave abusively do not expect those targeted or subject to your abuse to react passively. You are clearly behaving as a bad actor. New players should not be expected to "stake" anything (despite the fact I have). If Splinterlands is an investment vehicle rather than a game it should say so from the outset and drop the "game" pretence rather than lure people with promise of a functioning game. This would of course mean that the developers would have to register as an investment vehicle with the various financial authorities around the world on risk of direct legal action.
I would suggest that if you want to invest in stuff you focus on things that designed to be upfront about their investment status rather than hijacking a game. You bring the community to shame.
Again you missed the point that it is close to impossible for new players to sell as they have nothing sellable.
I'm against this, but I got rid of all of my SPS, so I can't vote on it. haha. I think SPS was a huge mistake in general, and I know that no one is going to agree with me on that one. I think the game is still fun in some ways, but it's become a big, complicated, expensive mess in other ways. Right now, I mostly play Frontier and I bot Wild. I rent SPS for the latter. If something like this passed, I would probably just finally sell all of my old cards, even though they've lost so much of their value.
Good luck!
I almost wish we could use a ratio score instead of a set value, so if people stake it all for long enough, they can earn full rewards. But that would get exploited, too. Everything gets exploited, that's part of the problem. But if we made everyone buy or earn 100,000 SPS to get "full" rewards (which are still not that great), and SPS was actually at like $.50 or something... no one in the world is going to spend that much on it to stake it. And earning it would take so long, especially if renting wasn't as useful.
It's yet another in a long list of catch-22s in this game and any game like this, where people expect to earn things and don't want to (or can't) spend thousands of dollars to do it.
I support the measure but have doubts about how it will be implemented, what happens if someone just stops the previous sps rentals and gets a new one?, that would lead to constant removals and new rentals to refresh the counter.
Honestly I would just lower the sps rental extraction based on leagues instead to affect the highest leagues more than bronze, silver where newbies could be.
That way you discourage sps rentals higher where ownership should be a must.
The decay is global not connected to the single rent/delegation.
Ah ok, like it more this way , thanks for the clarification I misunderstood the measure totally. :)
With the new structure for Sps requirements to participate in draws I was thinking about renting some SPS as to get to the next level would be a big investment for me, taking away some of the benefits of renting SPS at this time seems like a bad plan
I think this is the wrong direction. You should give SPS more utility not less and reducing renting/delegation efficiency is reducing utility. If you want more benefit to staking, create more areas where SPS need to be staked for benefits a.k.a more utility. The reason SPS rentals are cheap is that there are tons of players who either don't need the current utility (as in don't play in ranked) or have so much SPS that they can't utilize all of it (for example being in a far too low league for their stake).
SPS stake dependency for fortune draws is a good start, land seems like an opportunity too. More utility will give value to a gaming token.
In some way, the necessity for other players to rent more is itself a more utility scenario. In any case it is true that Dave and the company are working hard in order to create more use cases and that is for sure in the right direction.
This is more like a core issue of the game and giving you a reason to actually own and stake your own SPS. Honestly I rather rented SPS just goes away.
I think we need to hear from the team in regards to the scope of doing something like this. I'm not a fan of rentals personally as I've made no effort to hide over the years, but I am also curious to see if the new rewards cards with increased SPS incentives and the move to increase the amount of voucher cards, which should ultimately drive up the value of vouchers, is enough to encourage and further incentivize staking.
One theory I have is that if we look at the number of champ players and realize that they're going to need 5m SPS each (owned or rented) to maximize earnings with the new reward card structure, perhaps we could have a massive immediate impact on the SPS rental market.
Even if we assume that our largest stakeholders maximize their rentals by keeping 5m SPS in their accounts for playing and delegating out the rest, what's that look like? maybe 120-130m SPS available for rent across the board? Divide that by 5 and maybe 25 champ accounts worth of SPS available for rent. I think that could be absorbed quickly and it's not like we have to wait more than a couple of weeks to find out.
I'll be back home in like 2 days and I'll reach out to @davemccoy and the team to see what they think of the scope of work and see if they want to weigh in on this issue. Historically the team has been in favor of rentals as an ease of access mechanic and with enough incentives, maybe they can work.
At this point, I'm just "undecided" I suppose. I'll think more on the topic as I finish up the HIVEfestivities and head home.
I'm going to hold off on voting for now, as I have a question that needs clarification first: SPS rentals are usually canceled manually by the SPS owners after 7 days and then the renter needs to re-rent again. So I'm not sure how that 1% weekly efficiency decay is supposed to work, as rentals don't last beyond a week to begin with? Unless you're just talking about OTC deals not done through the official renting mechanism, in which case I don't think this proposal will have much of an effect.
If you can resolve the above question to my satisfaction, then you'll get my vote.
Dear Crypto, thanks for your question. Based on the proposal, the idea is to have a GLOBAL decay not connected to when the SPS are rented or delegated. 80% initially, then 1% tapering. It will not affect individual rent or delegation, but all of them.
Hi. Im going to vote no. Havent voted on anything in quite a while.
I am concerned this could make things worse for new players.
Also I think it's meddling with the market to try and sort a shortage of new players/player retention. If the new player numbers / retention continue to improve the SPS price / rental situation goes away.
Cheers
I'm not convinced this increases the rental price of SPS. I'm also not convinced that this helps increase the USD value of SPS. I am convinced it dampens a path already in-place that helps people play the game. I am convinced a consequence of this could be less SPS rentals/ same folks selling SPS as always/ a potential loss of some players or play-time for such players because of the sour aftertaste of slashed returns. Slashed returns for renting the same amount of SPS others decided to hold. I don't think that is fair. For that reason, if I do vote, I will be voting against.
We have some pretty significant changes coming regarding SPS utility... I think it would be good to see how those changes affects SPS renting before we try to force changes, especially those that might push renters away form the game...
I’m voting YES. The 20% initial cut + global 1% weekly tapering (to a 50% floor) is a fair, predictable way to rebalance incentives toward staking without nuking accessibility.
Please don‘t. It will be the next downwards spiral for the game.
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