Splinterlands Migrates To Decentralized Validator Nodes, Offers New Licenses

Blockchain play-to-earn game Splinterlands officially announced that it would be switching over to decentralized Splintershards (SPS) validator nodes. The mainnet of the SPS Validator node software is expected to roll out within the third or fourth quarter of 2022.

Aggroed Reich, CEO of Splinterlands said,

“This is a major step towards our goal of Splinterlands operating as a completely decentralized game that the players own and control through their SPS.”

In terms of technology, the SPS validator software is an open source technology that will enable anyone to download, and install without extra cost or restriction. Furthermore, the SPS validator node would only require minimal hardware requirements. It could be operated on Linux machines. The version for Windows and Mac OS will soon be available.

The SPS network will use the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) consensus as its governance mechanism. This provides voting power to any accounts with staked SPS tokens. All users with voting power can vote or elect users responsible for validating all SPS transactions and managing SPS foundation funds.

The more staked that back a validator, the more blocks they will be assigned and the higher their rewards.

To maintain fairness and equality in the voting process, the Splinterlands team will be offering “licenses.” This feature will enable all users to earn rewards for running nodes without needing to have any staked SPS votes. The SPS licenses can be purchased via a combination of SPS tokens and voucher tokens.

Moreover, the network will burn 80% of the SPS tokens and 100% of the voucher tokens spent by users on buying node licenses. The remaining 20% of the SPS tokens will be redirected to the SPS foundation. It will also be used to incentivize SPS validator nodes once the 3 billion SPS token cap is reached.

On the other hand, Splinterlands will roll out a total of 60,000 licenses in multiple phases, where the price of licenses will keep increasing after each phase. These licenses will be NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that can be bought, sold, and traded across secondary marketplaces.