Validator Node License Rewards

The Splinterlands team wants to extend a huge congratulations to the entire community on the incredibly successful sell-out of the presale tier of the SPS validator node licenses last week. Since all of the value from license sales goes to the token holders, its success is shared among all token holders as is also the responsibility for ensuring the future success of the SPS token project.

With that in mind, we have been working closely with many stakeholders and license purchasers since the sale to see how the project can continue to be improved and grown over time. One of the common pieces of feedback that we have heard is that there is some hesitation to get involved with licenses at this point based on the uncertainty around when the software will be ready and the rewards for license holders will begin.

As a result, we have been looking into how rewards can start being distributed before the software is live. To start - we are going to use the old voucher distribution system to begin paying out VOUCHER token rewards to license holders and we expect that to be live within the next week!

You may recall from the original validator node overview post (@splinterlands/splintershards-sps-validator-node-overview-and-license-presale) that a total of 20,000 VOUCHER tokens will be distributed equally among all license holders every day. At the time of writing, approximately 2400 licenses have been purchased, which means that each license holder will begin receiving 8.33 VOUCHER tokens per license every day. Please note that as more licenses are sold, the daily, per-license amount will be reduced proportionally.

License holders can expect the voucher rewards to be automatically credited to their in-game wallets once per day when this goes live and these transactions will be viewable in the balance history screen on the Splinterlands game website. We are planning to repurpose the right side of the SPS management screen to show a more detailed display of node license and rewards information once the SPS airdrop ends in late July.

Last, but not least, we are planning to begin the SPS reward payouts to license holders no later than the end of August even if the validator node software is not ready by then.

We hope that the beginning of reward payouts to license holders before the software is live will help increase confidence and reduce uncertainty around the project and encourage more participation in this exciting new chapter for the Splintershards token and ecosystem!

Finally, we want to add that the software testing is coming along very well, with only a small remaining list of outstanding issues, and we have every confidence that the validator node software will be live within our estimated timeline of Q4 of this year (2022), if not even earlier. We are extremely excited to finally put the SPS token fully into the hands of the holders and allow everyone the opportunity to participate in running and securing the system.