An all-leagues guide to how much SPS you should stake for maximum rewards

In a previous post, I showed what the ideal amount of SPS to stake was based on the earnings you get from each additional SPS you stake.

This post is a follow-up to that post fixing two issues/oversights.

Recap of the previous post

In the previous post, I showed that, with some assumptions, the ideal amount of staked SPS for players in Champion league was about 100k. Any less than that staked meant you'd get the biggest ROI by staking until you got 100k. Any additional SPS would best be spent in a liquidity pool (the Hive:SPS liquidity pool's APY forming the basis against which staking was judged).

Oversight #1: Forgetting the base APY for staked SPS.

In my calculations, I was very careful to account for all the sources of value stemming from additional RP for staking SPS. BUT I forgot the most basic return from staked SPS: the SPS and vouchers given to you as part of the airdrop for staked SPS. This is simple to add, fortunately, as it is a straight additive percentage increase at all levels.

Adding this in will have the effect of indicating a larger amount of SPS should be staked for optimal rewards.

Oversight #2: Including all the leagues

Hat-tip to @kalkulus for 1) pointing out to me that I should do this calculation for each league and 2) giving me the RP costs for the first daily chest in each of these leagues, which made this calculation much easier.

Doing this was fairly straightforward: I redid the calculations using each league rating and reward chest RP costs.

In general, because of the lower rewards and faster plateauing of the reward multiplier in lower leagues, the ideal amount of staked SPS in successively lower leagues will be increasingly lower.

The Results

Above you can see the results for all 5 leagues.

First, the horizontal line indicates the break-even point for putting SPS in the Liquidity Pool: 25%. Once each league's line goes below that horizontal line, it is better to not stake any more SPS.

Second, as we go up the leagues we see an increasing ideal amount of staked SPS: (Bronze: never, Silver: 20k, Gold: 60k, Diamond: 130k, Champion: 210k). Interestingly, the returns on bronze are so low, it almost never makes sense to stake much SPS; the value there would likely be better spent getting up to Silver league.

As noted above, the ideal staked SPS in each league is higher than what my previous model would have shown because this now correctly includes the baseline return APY for staked SPS in the form of more SPS and vouchers. Now, instead of 100k staked SPS being ideal for Champion League, 210k is the right amount. Looks like I need to be saving some more SPS.

Conclusions

As with last time, this analysis is not perfect. There are a lot of assumptions that you might disagree with (namely the value of each chest).

And there are some wonky pieces. The thing that sits least-well with me is that staked SPS is largely useless unless you also have a comparable deck. So while the marginal ROI of SPS is really high, that only happens after first investing $1000s for a deck of cards, which provide no ROI on their own. So in some sense, while the marginal ROI shown here is correct, the average APY would still likely be lower for staked SPS and cards combined rather than just throwing that all in an LP. BUT if all I cared about was ROI, I probably wouldn't be playing this game. I like splinterlands, and if I'm not engaging with the game, I should just go throw all the money here into some coin and leave it alone. But this is fun, and fun, to me, is worth some value and potential suboptimal placement.

Referral

Did you like this post? Is this making you interested in checking out Splinterlands, moving up the ranks, and staking some SPS? Use my referral link and I'll send you some cards to get you started!