Introduction
Today I would like to compare Splinterlands Play to Earn rewards with Hive Rewards. Splinterlands runs on Hive blockchain and the SPS Validators that were launched a couple weeks ago and about to go live with rewards tomorrow use Hive blockchain. In fact in order to run a Splinterlands SPS validator node you need some Hive Power.
So Hive and Splinterlands are in a symbiotic relationship what is good for Hive is good for Splinterlands and what is good for Splinterlands is good for Hive. For example if we have a bull run in crypto and SPS price pumps to 25 cents (about a 40x at this point) that would be great for Splinterlands as lots of players will join to compete for SPS rewards and these players will be buying Splinterlands assets driving asset prices higher. These players can be converted into Hive bloggers as there is lots of opportunity to earn on Hive and use half of the author earnings to buy Splinterlands assets.
But that is the future, what is the current state of the game? I am an avid Splinterlands player and try to optimize my earnings of SPS and Glint buy playing both Modern and Wild leagues. I think it is a small price to pay to play in wild league only two thousand DEC but it allows me to earn more glint and more league advancement chests.
Here is my performance last season for example:
| Stat | Wild | Modern |
|---|---|---|
| Rank | Champion #379 | Champion #174 |
| Rating | 3840 - Champion III | 3780 - Champion III |
| Rating High | 3880 | 3820 |
| Ratio (Win/Loss) | 1.07 (132/123) | 1.28 (96/75) |
| Longest Streak | 9 | 6 |
As you can see my performance was pretty good and I got better than fifty percent win rate in both Modern and Wild leagues. I am not a top player, but clearly I am better than average player especially in the Modern League.
Btw, the pretty table above is from Splinterstats Splinterlands Season Report Card by 
Splinterlands Earnings
Now let's see what I was able to earn as a better than average player in Diamond / Champion league.
| Type | ⭐ Amount |
|---|---|
| Staking Rewards | 309.533 |
| Ranked Rewards as above | 1655.941 |
| Brawl Rewards | 315.800 |
| License Stake Rewards | 83.024 |
| NET SPS | 2364.298 |
From the table above you can see that I earned 1,656 SPS from 228 total wins or on average 7.26 SPS per win. Obviously my SPS wins in Modern brought more SPS than my wins in Wild, but because I get chests from both leagues I believe that overall it is better to play in both leagues. Another factor to consider is the fact that if I keep playing in just Modern eventually I hit the level of opponents where my win rate drops way below 50%, therefore I strategically switch between Wild and Modern leagues throughout the season to optimize my winning rate.
Now lets assume that I would have played just in modern and maintained the same win rate. In that case I would guess my average SPS win per battle would be something like elven SPS tokens. So taking 228 wins at 11 SPS per win we get 2,508 SPS per season, that is about 900 SPS more than what my results are. I would guess that I would not be able to get more than 200 wins in reality, but let's just take the most optimistic scenario.
At the current price of SPS of $0.00635
My actual winnings are: $10.5156
Optimistic winnings would have been: $15.93
If we double these numbers we would get between $21 and $32 of earnings per month just for ranked battles. But I earned other rewards as well, I am in a top ten Guild that participates in tier 5 (maximum tier) brawls so I earned additional SPS from brawls and from staking rewards. So the most optimistic monthly earnings would be 6,267 SPS per month or $39.79
That sounds pretty good and if SPS were to reach say 10 cents all of a sudden these earnings would be worth $626.70 per month or $7,500 per year. Is it possible that we will see ten cent SPS this year? I would say yes, if there is an altcoin bull market with a gaming narrative I think we could see a 25 SPS.
So what does it take in Splinterlands to earn about $40 at these prices? First of you have to have Staked SPS. I have around 440K SPS staked that is worth $2,802 dollars at current prices:
In addition to staked SPS you would need to have cards to play. You can either rent cards or buy yourself a full Chaos Legion set like I have. Buying a core set would cost you around $728
Chaos Legion Rewards set is super cheap and has some very powerful cards so buying that set would cost you an additional $108:
I have some Riftwatchers cards, but you can get away without those and your total investment would be:
$2,802 + $728 + $108 = $3,638 total investment to earn $40 per month. Or an APR of 13.19%
Earnings on Hive
Now let's compare what you can earn as a blogger on Hive. First of all you need $0.00 to start blogging on Hive and you will build your Hive investment automatically if you follow a good Hive etiquette and leave half of your author rewards on Hive as Hive power. You can take 50% of your Hive author rewards and convert them into SPS or DEC to buy cards or packs for example. One of the Splinterlands criteria for rewarding Weekly Challenge posts is a KE coefficient which was invented by 
Another thing of note, Splinterlands runs weekly challenges and most of my Hive author earnings come from these two posts per week. So the big number that requires zero investment? Here it is:
These are my author rewards in the last 30 days! Did this get your attention? But that is not all, there are other ways to earn on Hive. Here is the full picture of my Hive rewards in the last thirty days:
Just to be clear my Hive Witness rewards are for the last twenty four days as that is when I became a Hive witness so you can add a few more dollars onto the total. Curation rewards depend on the amount of Hive you hold. In my case that is around 8000 Hive.
You can also earn by simply converting your Hive into HBD (Hive Backed Dollar) and deposit it into savings that would earn you a 15% on a stablecoin.
I don't have any HBD because I believe that Hive has a much higher upside potential than 15% so I keep my Hive in Hive Power where it earns at least 8%. So my total monthly earnings on Hive are around $220 compared to my Splinterlands earnings of $40 per month.
I hope you see that you can get somewhere between $50 and $70 per month from posting twice a week on Hive to buy your favorite Splinterlands assets. In addition to that you will grow your Hive Power by the same amount and build your Hive savings and influence on Hive platform.
Please vote for my SPS Validator node if you have some staked SPS HERE
I have recently became a Hive Witness and would really appreciate your vote for me as a witness.
You can vote the following way:
- Via PeakD: Visit PeakD Witnesses, enter “seattlea” in the Name Search, or scroll down to my current position (98 / 94) and simply click the Vote button on the right.
- Via Hive Signer: Vote for seattlea
If you wonder what is the best way to get involved you can use my link to begin your Splinterlands and HIVE journey.