If you haven't noticed, VOUCHER has been pumping. The Splinterlands team recently reorganized the SPS claim to include voucher and make it easier to see how much VOUCHER is giving to the APR of SPS staking. Check this out:
Part of the voucher price pump has to do with HIVE price sinking, at the time of posting we are just under 48cents. But its not just that, after all, the new set Riftwatchers was just announced that will be purchaseable with SPS only, and will only require VOUCHER for the presale (unknown how many), and for bonus pack numbers, like in the recent CHAOS launch. Read more about that here.
I think the real reason VOUCHER is pumping is because of Validator Nodes.
Now the information about Validator Nodes was released on April 14th, and it says that it will be a 'few months' before the test net is up, and sometime in Q4 before these Validator Nodes are launched.
The first 2000 nodes will require 500 VOUCHER each, thats 1 million VOUCHER.
And the future tranches will allow up to 500 VOUCHER each to be used for payment of half, leading to a effective price for VOUCHERS of $3, then $5, etc. Over time, these VOUCHER prices will only make sense if the SPS prices are rising as well. Time will tell how that will play out, but this game theory is very interesting.
7.3 million VOUCHER are printed each year, and they go to SPS stakers. We can make some simplifying assumptions and assume that half of that, or 3.65 million VOUCHERs will be printed between now and when Validator nodes are launched.
We don't know how many will be used in the Riftwatchers presale, but it seems like the team is going with a much smaller number of packs than the CHAOS set.
CHAOS bonus packs still need vouchers. 75 VOUCHER on each 500 pack purchase..... that might be as much as 15% of the remaining 6 million (+) packs, or 900k.
It seems like there is plenty to do with VOUCHERs in the mean time....since a VOUCHER can be redeemed for a Pack in certain purchases (4 USD on new packs, $2.75 in secondary market which do not qualify for airdrops), and there are plenty of future things VOUCHERs will be 'needed' for, it seems the market is just responding and pushing VOUCHER prices up to compensate for the value they can give in actual transactions.
So how to trade this market?
So after all that information, it all comes down to HIVE price. So much of Splinterlands is priced in USD, that the movements of HIVE price affect how we can trade these things on the internal DEX.
If HIVE price stays the same, I could see a bit more room for VOUCHER to go up, depending on how fast Riftwatchers comes out, which when that happens will definitely lead to a short term pump as seen in the CHAOS launch.
But the longer we grind for that, the price will probably plateau and start coming back down.... ceterus paribus.
If HIVE pumps? Expect VOUCHER price in HIVE to come down. If HIVE collapses to another rung lower (we are still not near the haircut so price could move fast), expect VOUCHER price to spike in compensation.
Good Luck!