Splinterlands and the Emergence of Yield Guild's SubDAOs

Yield Guild Games continues to position itself as a major stakeholder in the ever expanding play-to-earn (P2E) ecosystem of the Metaverse. Those following their journey closely are met with a constant flow of new partnership announcements, seed investments, NFT acquisitions, special community events, and alpha trials of the latest up and coming games. Yield Guild manages all of this and its 10K+ scholars successfully, but one might start to wonder how this scales as scholar counts rise into the hundreds of thousands — and one day millions. Enter: the SubDAO.

SubDAOs, such as YGGSPL (it’s Splinterlands-specific SubDAO), seek to remedy some of the pitfalls decentralized organizations like Yield Guild run into as they expand into an increasing number of games with soaring scholar numbers. Splinterlands is the game at the centre of Yield Guild’s new SubDAO. It’s a digital trading card game built on Hive, but also has functionality across several other blockchains including Ethereum, WAX, Tron, and BSC. Having been around since 2018, it’s no new kid on the block, born in the bear market just like Axie Infinity. Battles are quick, only taking a couple of minutes. This is because players strategize and pick their hand before the game. Once it starts the outcome is determined automatically based on the cards chosen, making for a fast-paced game that players have been flocking to — especially since the launch of their native token, SPS, earlier this year.

In our recent report “Dawn Of The Guilds”, we introduced the concept of SubDAOs and their role within Yield Guild’s broader ecosystem. In this report, we examine YGGSPL specifically, its relationship with Yield Guild, and the rationale behind game-specific SubDAOs. We also take a deep dive into Splinterlands by highlighting its recent growth in active users, marketplace activity, and token price in addition to exploring the game’s approach to airdrops, staking, play-to-earn, and game economics.

The YGGSPL SubDAO

The creation of the Splinterlands-focused YGGSPL SubDAO, will result in some restructuring of governance and ownership as it relates to Yield Guild’s Splinterlands NFTs. Control of the address holding the Splinterlands NFTs will be taken over by YGGSPL. Ownersh