Well, this is escalating quickly. 11% increase in marketcap since Beta Sold Out (yesterday)

Well, I was worried I was being aggressive in my prediction post. Looks like I wasn't being aggressive enough. The morning beta packs sold out we were at 3.33M. Today we're at 3.72M. That's about an 11% gain in 24-48hrs. Let's look at why.

New cards are being added to the pool

Every day there's some card inflation through rewards cards and opened booster packs. These add supply to the market. What this should be doing is keeping the total value the same, but each individual card should lose some value as more are printed if that's the only thing happening. Since the price is rising rather rapidly let's explore what else could be happening beyond simply inflating the supply with cards.

Card combining

In the beta booster series we minted 900,000 cards. There's 5 cards per pack. There's 4.5M cards in total in Beta. But cards take anywhere from 4-505 combined cards to reach a max level card. As it turns out, based on the distribution of cards there's only enough for 200-400 people to get a maxed version of any card, and that's assuming everyone was going after maxed cards. As it turns out there are tens to hundreds of people going after maxed cards, and there's also a few thousand going after non-maxed cards. There's not enough for everyone. So, despite there being 4.5M cards printed individual cards are in short supply.

Supply is shrinking

Now that beta is fully sold out and no more will print we've gone from the expansion phase of things to the shrinking phase of things. Every card that combines from won't be backfilled by a new beta pack getting opened. It's gone for ever and there's nothing to replace it.

I call this hyperdeflationary. The amount of cards doesn't just stay constant versus something getting printed (like long term amount of btc vs unlimited printing of fiat). The overall amount actually shrinks.

Over the past 30 days we're seeing about 1500 cards per day combined. That amount is unsustainable as we keep moving forward without new cards coming in, but you can see that here:

You can see how this plays out here

This is from the $decimation command that you can run in Splinterlands Discord. You can see the alpha cards that have a maximum amount of 1.5M are down to .334 million cards. Where did the rest go? They are all combined. Yep, we're at about 20% of original supply in 1 year since they sold out.

Where are we at for Betas? We're just shy of 1M cards out there. That sounds low to me, so I gotta check, but if this chart is diplaying what I think it's displaying we're already down to 20% of cards remaining and everything else combined. Not a lot of room left there.

What happens when supply shrinks and demands stays constant or increases?

Yep... that's what I think too. I'm confidant in the number of players for the game remaining constant or increasing. Mobile app should be out this year with a free to play option. That should drag a lot of people in here. But I also think that as people figure out these card prices are kinda exploding now that Beta is sold out people aren't going to want to miss out on the next round for UNTAMED. So, whether they are players, hodlers, or flippers I think this chart is going to motivate the smart money out there.

Should be fun.