December 2021 Earnings Recap - HIVE, PIZZA, SPT, ONEUP, and more!

Happy New Year! It took me a couple days to get this post ready for reviewing my Hive-based earnings for the month of December 2021, but here it is!

In my November 2021 HIVE earnings recap, I noted that I earned a little over $2000 on HIVE! Several things changed in the past month that makes that number nearly impossible to top this month. Let's have a look at the various sources of HIVE income I received in December.

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Blogging and Curation Rewards

On the main HIVE blogging chain, I took some screenshots from HiveStats.io to review my last 30 days of curation and author rewards from the posts I've published.

On a token basis, I saw myself earn a total of 77.56 HP and 84.45 HBD for a total value of $195.75. This is down about $100 from November and is likely the result of lower average prices for HIVE during the month of December.

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Splintertalk (SPT) Earnings

Total authorship SPT earned from Splintertalk.io in December = 14,512 ($58.04). As I've mentioned previously, it's nearly impossible to easily determine total curation rewards because Splintertalk does not populate those rewards in the wallet going back more than a few days. However, if I look at the past few days and average it out, I've been earning 171 SPT per day in curation, which equals out to 5,135 ($20.54) for the month.

The price of SPT has continued to fall and this has had a direct impact on the value of my rewards from writing content for Splintertalk. I am keeping my SPT power at 55,000 for now and will keep an eye on the price action to decide whether to add more in January.

My current curation APR for my SPT Power is about 112%, which is a bit of an increase from last month!

Adding together my authorship and curation SPT rewards, I received 19,647 SPT with a value of $78.59 this past month.

Adding the SPT earnings to the HIVE Power and HBD brings the total to: $274.64.

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Splinterlands

Source: Splinterlands.com

Splinterlands is an extremely addictive virtual card game on the HIVE blockchain and I've been getting more and more involved in it. I'm currently co-leader of [email protected] PIZZA 2 The Deep Dish guild and have been playing fairly well considering I rent most of my cards. Check out my latest #BrawlReport to see how fun this game is.

Two months ago I started buying up some Gold Foil Legendary cards as I found them to be very profitable, especially around the end of the season when players would pay upwards of $8 to rent each one for a day. I spent $3,179 buying eight GF Legendary cards that had the best ROI for renting. For a short time, I was making about $40/month per card, which is over 10% return on investment per month.

Unfortunately, this success was short-lived. When the first million Chaos Legion packs were released as part of the pre-sale, the price of these GF Legendary cards plummeted due to an enormous supply glut caused by all the new Chaos Legion cards. I saw the value of these cards falling fast and determined that the release of an additional 14 million Chaos Legion packs in the beginning of 2022 will cause another collapse in prices that will be multiples worse than this one so I sold everything I bought at a loss in order to protect from even larger losses when the general sale begins.

Ultimately, I sold these 8 cards for $2022 for a loss of $1,157. Adding back the $300 I made in rentals over the nearly two months and my total loss on this endeavor was about $800. Not only did the cards lose a lot of value, but the amount of rental income possible also plummeted.

I did not have any substantial earnings from gameplay in November and will just assume it as zero dollars for this analysis.

SPS and VOUCHER Rewards

I did not earn any notable airdrop rewards of SPS or VOUCHER tokens as my level of staked tokens was nearly completely drawn down as I put those funds to work buying the GF Legendary cards.

This month I'm recognizing an $800 loss on Splinterlands from the rental situation falling apart.

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PIZZA Token

The PIZZA token has shifted away from rewarding the Top 10 holders with a high APR and will be releasing a new plan for earnings for all holders of staked PIZZA in the coming months.

In the meantime, I have shifted some of my PIZZA holdings into several liquidity pools on Tribaldex and am earning an APR of about 100%. These earnings in December were about $30.

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Rising Star Game

Last month I reported that I had just hit level 39 in @RisingStarGame and I'm happy to say that this month I have achieved level 44. My short term goal is to hit level 50 and acquire the Millionaire Card. It appears only a few more months will be required until I reach that milestone.

I've been running a weekly Rising Star giveaway that has proven very popular and has been a lot of fun. Please feel free to check out my giveaway!

These posts have also generated a nice amount of author rewards that were included in the first part of this post, but I do not actively track the amount of Starbits rewards I receive playing the game.

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OneUp

This is the third month that I have been including the #OneUp tag in my gaming posts so I earn this new token. I staked 1,500 OneUp tokens early on in its release, the first 100 I received as a gift from @kennyskitchen.

My total authorship rewards on OneUp for December was 1015 tokens, worth $38.59. A rough estimate of curation rewards over the month comes to 245, or $9.32. This brings my total OneUp earnings for the month of November to 1,260 ($47.91).

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Orions Peak Gaming

I have managed to enter the Top 10 holders list for this token. I achieved this rank solely by publishing gaming content and using the OPG tag. OPG is awarded through manual curation and does not appear to yet have a staking function, although I imagine that may be something that could come to fruition in the future.

I have continued to stack these OPG tokens with regular posts about Hive gaming content and earned another 62 tokens from author rewards and Top 10 holder rewards. Those 62 tokens are worth about $10. The tokens are very thinly traded as the project is just getting off the ground, but this looks like a good way to earn rewards if you're already writing about gaming on HIVE!

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December Earnings Recap

HIVE Blogging/Curation: $195.75 (77.5 HP, 84HBD)
Splintertalk: $78.59 (19,647 tokens)
Splinterlands: -$800
PIZZA: $30
OneUp: $47.91 (1,260 tokens)
OPG: $10 (62 tokens)

Total: -$437.75 USD

In November, I earned a little over $2,000 in HIVE-related earnings. In December I was hit hard by the severe dilution of GF Legendary Splinterlands assets and this caused me to actually lose money on HIVE for the month. However, I firmly believe I have saved myself a considerable amount of money by selling now instead of waiting longer. What I may do is re-buy those assets much cheaper after the Chaos Legion general sale causes prices to plummet in the Spring of 2022 due to a massive supply shock.

Excluding Splinterlands losses, my HIVE earnings would have been $363... which is still a far cry from the $2000 that I earned in November. Things are always evolving on the blockchain and this fluctuation is proof of that.

December was a brutal lesson in the economics of supply and demand in a blockchain gaming environment. I'm still fascinated by the economics of Splinterlands and think this experience has given me better insight and a stronger (and hopefully profitable) strategy heading into 2022.