"Became a merchant" Challenge Diary (after 5 weeks)

By @peter.quill2/8/2026hive-13323

Hi!

At the beginning of this year, I started a challenge related to Splinterlands Market Pools. You can read about it in this post

In this article, I would like to share the status after the first 5 weeks.

What do I do every Sunday?

As I described in my initial post, I provide 10k DEC worth liquidity to the five pools (2k each) each week. I also try to maintain the balance between them (20% each), so if one liquidity contains more value, I will put less DEC into that.

Steps for each pool:

  1. Calculate how much DEC I will invest in the pool (e.g., 2000 DEC)
  2. Buy the particular asset for half of the DEC (e.g., GRAIN for 1000 DEC)
  3. Put the remaining DEC and the asset into the corresponding pool (DEC-GRAIN)

Why are we starting immediately with a -10% loss?

Currently, if you would like to swap your DEC to any other asset (VOUCHER, GRAIN, WOOD, STONE, IRON), you must calculate with a 10% fee. E.g., if you want to buy GRAIN from 1000 DEC, you only get GRAIN after 900 DEC.

The rule is the same in the other direction. If you would like to sell 1000 GRAIN, you will only get DEC after 900 GRAIN. When I will once "cash out", I will be able to sell only 90% of my assets :S

So reaching our goal will be a little bit harder, because we have to make at least 10% profit to reach only the break-even point.

When I calculate the DEC to invest, I use the following formula:

DEC to buy the asset = DEC to invest / 19 x 10

(I need 10 part of DEC and 9 part of the asset for the liquidity)

Aggregated transactions (week 1-5)

Market DEC Investment Asset Investment Asset Amount Average Asset Price
VOUCHER 4,979.122 5,532.381 179.793 30.77084
GRAIN 4,762.006 5,291 281,055.069 0.01883
WOOD 4,879.239 5,421 120,470.745 0.04500
STONE 4,499.341 4,999 51,306.988 0.09743
IRON 4,562.298 5,069 10,883.095 0.46577
Total 23,682.006 26,312.381

Asset price changes

Asset Initial price (01.04) Price after 5 weeks Change Change %
VOUCHER 35.58400 27.61209 -7.97191 -22.40%
GRAIN 0.01944 0.01812 -0.00132 -6.80%
WOOD 0.06310 0.04157 -0.02153 -34.12%
STONE 0.09417 0.10533 0.01117 11.86%
IRON 0.49252 0.49672 0.00420 0.85%

Currently, only the price changes of STONE and IRON are positive, but thanks to the multiple transactions and balancing, we don't have such a huge loss.

Portfolio Status

Market Investment DEC value Asset value* Total DEC value Profit Profit % Percentage
VOUCHER 10,512 4,743 4,269 9,012 -1,500 -14.27% 20.10%
GRAIN 10,053 4,692 4,223 8,915 -1,138 -11.32% 19.88%
WOOD 10,300 4,714 4,243 8,957 -1,344 -13.04% 19.97%
STONE 9,498 4,707 4,236 8,943 -555 -5.84% 19.94%
IRON 9,631 4,745 4,271 9,016 -616 -6.39% 20.11%
Total 49,994.387 23,601 21,240.9 44,841.9 -5,152.487 -10.31% 100%

* Asset value = 0.9 x DEC value

Summary: Although there were massive price changes, we only have a -0.31% loss above the initial -10%. I'm still curious 😉

Thank you for reading this!

Peter

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