Why Does Splinterlands Whale Account Has the Lowest APR among top 600 Curators?

Introduction

While I was playing with my favorite Hive Curation Dashboard I noticed something really interesting the Splinterlands account that is supporting Splinterlands content creators has one of the lowest APRs among top 600 Hive Curators and has absolutely the lowest APR among all Hive Whale Curators!

In this post I would like to use some of the tools that I have created on Hive to explore why this is the case. I am going to provide a detailed explanation of what is going on, but if you are busy and don't want to bother with reading all of the details and explanations just scroll down to the very end and read a short Executive Summary.

Splinterlands Curation Problem

First lets take a look at where the Splinterlands Hive Curation account stands in terms of Total Hive Power among top 600 curators on Hive:

The table above comes from the Curators Dashboard for the Last Seven Days. All I did was sort by the Total Hive Power. What we see is that steemmonsters account is ranked at 22nd position among top 600 curators by staked Hive Power. However in terms of rewards it is ranked at number 90! As you can see the other whales in the top 22 in this image are close to their ranking in both Hive Power and weekly Hive earned.

Splinterlands low ranking in rewards is explained by the very low APR of 1.63%. There are no other whales in this image that have this kind of extremely low APR! The lowest is smooth with 5.31% APR that is ranked at number seven by rewards instead of number five like his Hive Power would imply. Still at 5.31% smooth is killing it compared to @steemmonsters

Also, when I say that 8.66% is nothing special, here is another visual from the top 600 curators dashboard:

The 37 curators from the above dashboard have APRs between 9.25% and 13.5% and are ranked by the number of Hive rewards earned.

Impact of Poor Curation Performance

As you can see from the image above most whales earn between high seven percent and 11.44%. Let's take a decent, but not extremely good APR of @solominer of 8.66% and see what steemmonsters account would have earned at that APR.

For the baseline here is the approximate APR calculation for the last 7 days for Splinterlands:
(1,197,172 HP * 0.0163 (1.63% APR) ) / 52 Weeks = 375 HP earned for last week.

Now let's take 8.66% APR

(1,197,172 HP * 0.0866 (8.66% APR) ) / 52 Weeks = 1,994 HP could have been earned last week

So 1,994-375 = 1619 EXTRA HP per week could have been earned last week if Splinterlands have earned an about average Whale HP.

This extra 1,619 HP could have been staked to increase steemmonsters HP and get bigger Hive rewards and more support for Splinterlands content creators or could have been used to support Splinterlands tokens such as DEC or SPS. These days 1,619 Hive doesn't go very far, but still it is $73 per week left on the table or 26,240 SPS tokens that could have been purchased weekly to support SPS price:

Why Splinterlands Curation APR is So Low?

Now that we have seen how Splinterlands curation performance compares to other curators lets try to find out why the APR is so low. To do that we can use another tool: Hivelytics 2.0. The first problem that immediately jumps out at me is that Steammonsters account is sitting at 100% vote power and if you are sitting at 100% you are obviously not earning any curation by doing that. In fact after Hive fork 28 last year there is no excuse for doing that as your voting power doesn't go down even if you are at 2%. So Splinterlands can vote their vote power down to 0% and will have seven days to recover to 100% again and in that case earn much better curation rewards. Basically good voting power to maintain is no more than 40% which means you have 20 votes or about two days worth of 100% power votes.

You can also see this problem in the voting data from the earlier dashboard. As you can see from the image above Splinterlands had 50 payout events in the last seven days, meaning that they had less than 70 payout events of 100% upvotes and I know Splinterlands doesn't vote with 100% ever! So the basic problem is that Splinterlands Hive Power is sitting un-used.

Now let's take a look at what is actually going on with the votes. The second problem is glaringly apparent when you use Hivelytics 2.0 to sort Splinterlands Curation Votes by Efficiency:

As you can see two of the posts upvoted by Splinterlands were upvoted after 3 and 4 days which dropped the vote efficiency down to 16.3 and 18.6% which is terrible for Splinterlands and that was on the highest value of the vote given by Splinterlands curators at 60% of the total Hive Power! Both of these were curated by @bunsbagsandcaps

But there were other low efficiency upvotes as well, there were total of 16 out of 67 upvotes that were after the first 24 hours so they were low efficiency. I believe @acidyo has brought this issue to the light in the past and things have definitely improved, but with all the changes at Splinterlands and perhaps some new curators things are starting to get worse again.

There are other interesting data points in the Curator Voting History Dashboard:

This chart shows historically un-usual allocation of weekly Rewards this year to one particular account by @steemmonsters . That green spike on the left of the chart is @mango-juice receiving between 10 and 30% of the total weekly curation rewards from Splinterlands this year. You can also view this data just for the one account in question:

I am not suggesting anything intentional going on here, but it is interesting how visual data tends to jump out at you.

You can dig in deeper into this using my Curator Voting History Dashboard if you wanted to. Here is Splinterlands complete voting history for the week of July 06th 2026 for example:

Executive Summary

This analysis highlights a significant underperformance issue with the Splinterlands Hive curation account (@steemmonsters). Despite ranking among the largest Hive curators by staked Hive Power - 22nd among the top 600 curators, the account ranks only 90th in weekly Hive rewards. The primary reason is an exceptionally low curation APR of approximately 1.63%, the lowest among all Hive Whale curators.

The data suggests that the account’s Hive Power is not being utilized effectively. A significant portion of available voting power remains unused, with the account frequently sitting at 100% voting power. Since Hive rewards active and timely curation, unused voting power represents missed opportunities to generate additional rewards that could be reinvested into supporting Splinterlands creators, strengthening the ecosystem, or acquiring Splinterlands-related assets such as SPS.

Based on comparable whale curator performance, an average APR of around 8.66% would have generated approximately 1,619 additional Hive Power per week compared to the current results - equivalent to roughly $73 weekly or more than 26,000 SPS tokens at current values. Over time, these missed rewards could represent a substantial amount of additional support for the Splinterlands community.

The analysis also identifies issues with voting efficiency. Several high-value votes were cast days after content publication, significantly reducing their curation effectiveness.

Optimizing vote timing and especially the utilization of available Hive Power could dramatically improve curation performance and increase the resources available to support Splinterlands content creators and the broader ecosystem.

Perhaps Splinterlands leadership can fix this by encouraging Splinterlands curators to:
1. Make sure that voting power is not sitting idle and vote down the Voting power to 50% or lower

2. Make sure content is voted in the first 23 hours after it is published on Hive blockchain and definitely not 3 or 4 days after the publication.

@davemccoy @clayboyn @azircon @yabapmatt.sps

---

I am a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness: https://vote.hive.uno/@seattlea