I've spent the last few weeks on a project to build a system that allows for staking accounts on Splinterlands - card owners can delegate to one of our accounts, players can play on them with no up-front cost, and revenue is automatically shared between them.

How does it work?

Herons Unlimited operates a number of accounts named after herons, cranes, and other waterfowl. When a delegator signs up, they delegate a functional full team to one of our accounts, and determine what share of revenue they wish to seek. Then either they or we find a player to take over the account.

When a player signs up, we send them a posting key so they can sign in to Splinterlands, and they simply play. When they finish a daily quest or a season, DEC is swept into their Steem-Engine account, and Reward Edition cards are automatically converted to DEC through the @ottermaker service. Then the DEC is automatically distributed between the owner's and the player's Steem accounts according to the agreed upon split. Dec is also swept every 2.5 hours, for play outside of the daily quest.

Tournaments which pay out in Steem/SBD work the same way, with distribution happening immediately when the prize arrives. Tournament splits can be set independently of DEC splits.

Herons-Unlimited automatically starts daily quests at the minimum possible time, and if the account has an empty splinter it will reject those quests automatically as well, so card owners only need to provide four splinters worth of team.

How fast is it?

This fast:

^{The next one was a Unicorn.}

The cards are already gone and the DEC is swept before I can finish opening my quest rewards. For card owners, this means you never have to worry about the player taking the best cards. Because the accounts never hold assets, the most a player can take is the owner's share of 2.5 hours of DEC earnings, which isn't ever going to be worth losing the account over.

Fees

We don't take a percentage of earnings. Our fees come from the differential between the DEC value and the market value of cards sent to Ottermaker. This solves the problem of how to fairly split Reward cards between owner and player while also paying for the service.

Looking for both card owners and players

@nealmcspadden is our first card owner, and when I started writing this post he had one Champion-level account running and two available. I had to stop in the middle to set up one of the new ones. I expect there will be plenty of players looking to participate, including for Silver, Gold, and maybe even Bronze-level accounts, and given that I hope we can attract more owners as well.

For owners we have several advantages over the rental market:

• Delegate full teams at once
• Get value from non-max cards
• When a player leaves, we switch the player not the account, so no cooldown
• Payouts in percentages of earnings, so no risk of setting the wrong USD price

Further Details

Program basics and news will always be available on the posts of the @herons-unlimited account.

In order to sign up or ask us questions, please come to the Otterworks Discord.