About:

Reasoning

I believe that the current 100K DEC cost for submitting a proposal is too prohibitive for the average invested Splinterlands player, or even the above-average invested Splinterlands player.

The goal of the SPS proposals are for the community to be able to weigh in on topics specifically surrounding the SPS token. The Splinterlands team has also often recommended the path of submitting a proposal for non-SPS related things (though the subject of whether this should be the case is always debated). The most common response to suggested core changes are to submit a proposal. I believe that this process needs to be easier. Ideally I would love to see more integration into the Splinterlands website, but I completely understand the team has limited resources and why that would not be a priority. Therefore I am proposing the simplest possible change to make things easier for the time being.

Let's look at the proposal history in the last year (10/1/2024-10/1/2025):

• Total number of proposals: 61
• Number of proposals not by Splinterlands or Clay: 4
• Number of proposals passed which were not by Splinterlands or Clay: 0

To me this is really de-motivating. It's suggested to submit proposals to change things, but this is not happening. The rare cases it has happened it's on a 0% success rate. Who is going to burn 100K (valued at $65ish dollars at the time of this post) for something that has a high probability of failure? I've invested a lot in this game and I'm not even willing to do that for this particular thing which I heavily believe in.

I understand that someone could always work with the team or clay to get the funding for a proposal, but to me that just represents another barrier. Someone should just be able to have a well formed idea and submit a proposal and we all vote on it.

I picked 10K as the value to reduce the cost to. To me this represents fair value given the likely low success rate. The existence of a cost should also limit proposal spam. I think it is important to have a cost, it just shouldn't be so high. We've had 4 SPS holder proposals in the past year, even if we 10x that number, 40 proposals is less than one per week.

Potential Benefits

• Actionable good ideas which benefit the ecosystem
  • I think there are lot of good ideas in the community. I feel like there are cases where people would vote for something if there was a proposal and it could pass. These are the things we need if we want to be successful!
• Data backed evidence of sentiment
  • A lot of things get brought up over and over again and the general thought on the items is that they wouldn't pass a vote. It would make this cheaper for someone to find out if it would. Often discussions around proposals are helpful or beneficial as well.

Potential Concerns

• There may be an overwhelming increase in the number of SPS holder proposals (spam)
  • I personally find this unlikely to be the case. It's well felt (and seen by evidence) within the community that proposals can easily be voted down. I don't think people are going to burn money excessively. 10K DEC still represents 6+ dollars.
• Something may pass which is not well thought out or a poor decision
  • This is a risk, but this is also the setup that we have provided for ourselves. The SPS holders have the power to vote any proposal down and it requires a strong majority. I think the potential for good new ideas outweighs this potential risk.
• More proposals will cause more conflict
  • I know there is some thought that we should keep proposals to a minimum to reduce conflict. I agree that conflict is bad, but I also like to think that we can have productive conversations around proposals. We have a lot of very smart people in our community. Also, knowing for sure the answer to a question should reduce the amount of times that particular item gets brought up, or at least concrete evidence could be provided to show it doesn't have support.

Proposal:

Reduce the cost of a SPS proposal to 10,000 DEC.