It's been some time since my last post so what better way to kick off 2020 with a fresh new STEEM post!
Happy New Year All!!!

Dear Splinterlands friends! There has been some exciting news in the last few weeks, the successful release of Untamed, which brought out a whole set of new cards, and several all-time high records were broken, like the record for active players and total market cap.

In case you don't know, I'm running the Splinterlands bot in the Splinterlands Discord server. It's a bot providing several commands linked to game information and statistics. Most frequently used commands are the $stats and $marketcap commands, showing respectively, the individual player deck statistics and the total market cap value.

Splinterlands Marketcap

I want to take a moment to explain exactly how the market cap value returned by the $marketcap command, and seen in the screenshot further down on this page, is calculated.

Problems/Limitations

When trying to calculate an accurate market cap value, I would like to highlight the following two problems.

1. Illiquidity
   Many cards are traded every day, but especially for Gold Foil Legendary (aka GFL) cards, trades are rare. Weeks or even months can pass between two trades. This market illiquidity means that a card's true value is not accurately reflected.
2. XP level impacts base card price
   Cards can be sold at any XP level, either as a single base card or as a fully combined card with over 500 base cards. Normally, fully combined cards have a lower price if comparing the base card price. This is applicable if we keep track of one base card price per card type. Trying to keep track of the price for each XP level would not really be feasible. There would basically be too many levels, and we would have another illiquidity issue.
   See an example of this price difference in the screenshot below. It's the current cards for sale for a Beta Kobold Miner. A fully combined card at Level 10 has an average base card price of 0.071 USD, while a single card is at sale for 0.097 USD.

Screenshot from: https://peakmonsters.com/market

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Marketcap calculation

Here is a rundown of how the market cap calculation, including how the problems listed above are partially tackled.

1. All closed trades are processed. ONLY the closing price of a completed trade is used.
2. For combined cards, the average price for a single base card is calculated.
3. The value from Step 2 is added to the currently stored price and then divided by 2.
4. The value from Step 3 is used for the market cap calculation.

For the problem with illiquidity, there is nothing really to do about it. Step 3 above will only help, to some degree, to smooth out the value in case of an extremely mispriced trade, as the new closing price will only have a 50% impact on the new value. This is not an optimal solution. For example, in cases where a drastic price change is justified, this smoothing effect will only cause a delay in reflecting a card's actual value.

For the 2nd problem listed above, the smoothing effect from Step 3 will play a much more critical role. As closed trades only have a 50% impact on the new value, there is less fluctuation when there is a mix of trades with low XP cards and fully maxed cards. This "should" create a reasonably accurate average for each card's actual value.
But generally speaking, decks with only maxed cards will have an overestimated value, while decks with only single cards will be underestimated.

As the market cap is based on the price of closed trades, what will happen if a card has never been traded?
-Nothing.
A card without trades will not be part of the calculation. Before Untamed this number was 0. With the Untamed release, there are now some very rare cards out there which have never swapped hands. As they are rare, few in numbers, also means they can be ignored when it comes to the total market cap value.

What about mispriced GFLs? What will these expensive cards do to the market cap?
Out of all cards, GFLs, and gold for that matter, are not among the cards with the highest total value. In the Top 20, there is only one gold card. That is the GFL card, Lord Arianthus, exactly at spot 20. So GFLs importance when it comes to the overall market cap should not be overrated.

Let's have a look at some stats

The total market cap can easily be checked on the Discord server, but I want to dig a bit deeper and show you some additional statistics. I will try to publish these as well in the near future.

The snapshot for this data was taken a couple of days before Christmas. I was delayed by various Christmas preparations and gift unwrapping activities, so I couldn't publish this right away.

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1 - Total Marketcap

This is the same output as from the $marketcap command, here highlighted with two events in the last few months. The first being the end of the public Beta packs sale. It was interesting to witness how the prices of beta cards spiked. Also, check out this spike in the screenshot below.

The second event is the release of Untamed. Not a huge spike, but a decent gradual increase. Cards need to be traded before the value will be reflected, so that partially explains it.
Again, correlate with the screenshot below and see how the Beta cards value dropped a couple of weeks after the Untamed release.

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2 - Marketcap divided per edition

Here is the market cap broken down per edition. Beta cards make up almost 50% of the total market cap, and Beta and Alpha together make up nearly 75%.

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3 - Marketcap - Gold vs Regular

This one shows the difference between Regular and Gold cards. Since June, the value of regular cards has grown at a much faster pace compared to gold cards.

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4 - Top 5 Cards - Total Value

Here is a Top 5 graph of the cards holding the most value. Four of them are summoners with Alric Stombringer appearing twice, with both the alpha and the beta card. None of them are gold cards.

16 - Alric Stormbringer - Beta - Regular - 103K USD
82 - Lord Arianthus - Reward - Regular - 73K USD
112 - Prince Rennyn - Beta - Regular - 70K USD
27 - Lyanna Natura - Beta - Regular - 68K USD
16 - Alric Stormbringer - Alpha - Regular - 67K USD

The first gold card is Lord Arianthus, at place 20. It holds a total value of 36K USD.

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I hope you enjoy the stats. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you have any request for additional data.

Please consider voting me as a Witness.

Vote for @danielsaori

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