Card Locking Feature & DEC Updates

Locking Cards

As part of our recent focus on increased security for players' accounts and assets, we have built a new feature into the game which will allow players to "lock" their cards, preventing them from being transferred, sold, or burned until they are "unlocked", which will take a specified number of days after the unlock transaction is submitted. Locked cards will still be able to be used in battles and delegated or rented out like normal.

Players will now have the option to lock and unlock their cards through the Splinterlands website or by submitting transactions directly to the blockchain. The technical details of the new feature are included below, and we hope that third party websites and tools such as Peakmonsters or others will be created to allow players to view and manage their locked cards more efficiently.

Card locking will work similarly to powering up HIVE tokens - meaning that when a card is locked it will remain locked indefinitely without requiring any input from the owner. When the owner submits an unlock transaction for the cards then the unlocking timer will start and the card will not be unlocked and transferrable until that timer completes.

When a player chooses to lock one or more cards, they will be prompted to choose the number of days that the unlocking process will take with the minimum number of days being 1 and the maximum being 30. This way players can each individually choose the amount of unlock time that they would like, and also have the flexibility to lock certain cards with different unlock times than other cards.

As an example, let's say that a player locks a card with an unlock time of 5 days. This card will then not be able to be transferred, sold, burned, converted from Alpha to Beta, or anything else that would destroy or move the card until it is unlocked, but the card can still be used in battles, combined, or delegated/rented to another account.

If the player would like to unlock the card so it can be transferred, sold, burned, etc, then they will need to submit an unlock transaction (which can be done by clicking on the lock icon next to the card on the card details view on the Splinterlands website).

Submitting the unlock transaction will start the 5 day timer for the card to be unlocked. After 5 days goes by since the unlock transaction was submitted, the card will be unlocked and will be able to be transferred, sold, or burned as normal. Players will also have the option to cancel the unlock process during the unlocking period.

If, in this example, the player was hacked and their private active key or master password was stolen, then the hacker would only be able to start the unlock process for that card. This would give the account owner 5 days to notice that their keys had been compromised and unauthorized activity had taken place on their account, change/recover their keys, and cancel the unlocking process for the card - thus preventing it from being stolen.

Combining Locked Cards

Locked cards will be able to be combined with other cards to level them up as normal, however the resulting combined card will be locked with the maximum number of unlock days among the cards being combined.

For example, if five cards are being combined together and one of the five cards is locked with an unlock time of 3 days, another is locked with an unlock time of 7 days, and the other three are not locked, then the resulting card will be locked with an unlock time of 7 days.

Cards that are currently within the unlocking process will not be able to be combined until either the unlocking process is completed or is cancelled.

Card Locking Technical Details

All card locking and unlocking transactions must be signed with the private active key for the owner's account (assuming the "require active authority" setting is enabled) in order to be considered valid.

The new transactions and paramters for locking and unlocking cards are detailed below:

• sm_lock_assets - This transaction will lock one or more cards with a specified unlocking period.
  • asset_ids - array of card IDs to lock
  • lock_days - integer number of days for the unlock period (1 - 30)
• sm_unlock_assets - This transaction will start the unlock process for one or more cards.
  • asset_ids - array of card IDs for which to start the unlock process. Please note that each card may have a different unlocking time period.
• sm_cancel_unlock_assets - This transaction will cancel the unlocking process for one or more cards.
  • asset_ids - array of card IDs in the unlocking process which should be cancelled.

Locking Other Types of Assets

We are also currently working on allowing the locking of other types of assets in the game, including land, titles, and other tokens, however we felt that the cards were the most important assets and wanted to get that feature out as soon as possible without waiting for the locking of other types of assets to be implemented first.

Notifications

A key component of the card locking feature will be the ability for players to receive notifications whenever transactions happen that affect their locked cards (or even unlocked cards) and other assets so that they can respond to any unauthorized transactions. While there is no such notification system in place yet, and we didn't want to wait for that to be available before allowing players to start locking cards, we are planning to work on building such a system and getting it available to players as quickly as possible.

DEC Ranked Battle Reward Pool Update

Demand for the DEC token has been increasing recently along with new uses for the token being released and growing general demand for Splinterlands assets, and as a result we wanted to make some changes to certain parts of the system that we feel could use some improvement.

The first area is the amount of DEC tokens being awarded for ranked battle wins on a daily basis. The initial plan, which is in place currently, is that initially 1M DEC tokens would be allocated to the ranked battle reward pool every day, and that amount decreases by a rate of 1% per month. This mechanism works well for a token that is intended to have a decreasing inflation rate over time, however for a token that is intended to have a more stable value the inflation rate should be able to adjust based on market conditions.

In order to help achieve that goal and help maintain the stability of the DEC token, the amount of DEC allocated to the ranked battle reward pool will be reset to the initial rate of 1M DEC / day and will automatically decrease if the external market price of DEC falls below $0.001 / DEC and will automatically increase if the market price goes above $0.001 / DEC. The amount of the increase or decrease will be proportional to the amount that the market price has deviated from the intended value.

This change is planned to be released on Wednesday, May 12th, 2021 - approximately one week from the date of this post.

Stay tuned for more updates from the Splinterlands!

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NOTE: All rewards from this post will be burned.