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title: Rebranding and Restructuring for now and the future

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# Rebranding and Restructuring for now and the future
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There is an ancient curse, which at first sounds like a blessing,  "May you live in interesting times."

Splinterlands has no doubt had some of the most intersting times as we are one of the first NFT gaming companies to form and take off into the world.  We've been to every NFT NYC, and we're amazed every time at all the new businesses we see and the lack of last year's businesses being there any more.  We've seen crazy ups, crazy downs, black swans, white rhinos, and experienced nearly every emotion along the way.  "How are we going to spend all these billions?" is quickly followed up the next night with "who will let my family with 5 kids couch surf?"

What keeps this crazy ship steady is that throughout all of it we have a pragmatic and conservative approach to a lofty vision.  We know crypto can change the world and we know that when it reaches the masses it can unlock a level of peace, prosperity, and freedom never seen on this world.  We also believe to our core that there are financial rewards for all of us if and when that vision is achieved.  But we also know that to get there we have to make baby steps and keep our wits about us as move forward.  Crypto is the Wild West on steroids, and we do our best to treat it with respect and caution it deserves and has earned.  But we'll take dangerous freedom over safe serfdom any day of the week.

# Market Conditions

Splinterlands is not directly effected by things like the Terra/Luna collapse or the FTX scandal.  We don't control customer funds nor do we store  customer funds.  We don't leverage long/short our crypto positions.  For a bunch of degens we do our best to keep out of deals/scam that sound too good to be true.

Just because we're not directly impacted by these collasal enterprises breaking down doesn't mean we're immune from the impact.  FTX is rumored to have fiat liabilities in the $10-50B range.  Enron was about $22B.  So, the failure of FTX could be twice as big as the Enron collapse.

As these various crypto companies and projects go down they have a habit of bringing bitcoin with it.  Many times the worst projects are leveraging their tokens at ever increasing amounts to get the return they need to pay the investors in the projects.  Eventually, it appears many of these type of leverage schemes fail and people lose nearly everything.  When these failures happen people are often forced along the way to sell bitcoin or "deploy capital" to hold their products up.  That works infrequently, but more frequently it simply crashes both the price of bitcoin and the price of the altcoins involved.  As bitcoin goes down, altcoins go down, nfts go down, and specifically regarding the Splinterlands ecosystem the card market becomes more attractive than buying packs.  When that happens our sales drop.  When there's multiple black swan events in a year, a proxy war in Ukraine, a raging FED pushing interest rates up at blistering paces while wrecking the economy left and right we are unfortunately lacking the "immune" ability on our business and despite not involving ourselves in those affairs directly we are impacted.  The majority of our finances are onchain.  You can see that pack sales have slowed dramatically.

This is especially difficult as we've built most of our business in the early part of the year where times were booming and we focused on how do we grow out our organization quickly and efficiently with room to scale up.  Ultimately, we'd like to see our business turn into something like a Web 3 Disney.  Along the way we think there's an immediate step of white labeling the core tech we've built for other projects and morph into something that resembles a web 3 app store. In the mean time we're looking to make good on our public plans we've shared with this community for our existing projects of Splinterlands and Genesis League Sports.

# Projects we intend to finish

Regardless of market conditions we've made public announcements and pre-sales in various areas and some of those areas include development that still needs to occur.  In that regard we are looking forward to completing:

Splinterlands Land Expansion
Tower Defense Expansion
Runi Expansion
Rebellion Edition
Boss Fights

Validator Node system for Splinterlands and the White Label Platform

MLSPA soccer/futball game for Genesis League Sports

# Projects we plan to take on
New Player Experience - XXX
Guild Alliance- XXX
Soulbound Reward Cards -XXX



# Our goals looking forward
As we look to the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 we're setting clear priorities for our business in this larger ecosystem.

1.  It's our highest mission to preserve value in the ecosystem for players.  The single most important part of this is ensuring that the servers that operate the game continue to run.
2.  We need to outlast the bear market.  We anticipate 9-18 months of market turmoil and contagion.  This is crypto.  It's possible that by December a tsuanmi of money floods into crypto and this entire market doubles in a week.  But it's irresponsible to count on that.  If we're wrong we'd like to be wrong on the conservative side.  So, we're looking at ways to make sure we have everything we need to outlast the bear and thrive in the next bull.
3.  We need to dedicate ourselves to the goal of ensuring we have a great culture, a well funded company, the resources necssary to build great products, and a long lasting champion for peace, prosperity, and freedom.

# There's four key things you need to do to have a successful business
There's a key difference between doing something as a business and doing something as a hobby.  A hobby you can spend money and not expect a financial return.  Running a business is different.  You have to operate the business so that you have cash on hand and so that the cash you generate is in excess of the cash you spend.  In order to increase cash on hand there's really only 4 things that a business can do.

(Review these in light of changes)
1. Cut Costs
2. Increase Asset Value
3. Be Efficient
4. Raise Capital

# Cut Costs

Though it pains us greatly to do it, we can't risk getting ourselves in a spot where we run out of money.  If that happens the stored value of all the community assets goes to zero and it's completely untenable.  We also can't be in a position where there's only a month of runway or there's no piggy bank for a rainy day.  We've done the best we can to honor and respect the contributions of many people that have helped Splinterlands roll out more code than we've ever cranked out before, contacted more people than we ever have before, supported more people than we ever have before, and shared more of our creative vision than we ever have before.  But the current rate is unsustainable for where the industry is at.  We've taken the drastic step of reducing our workforce by 60% and for those that stayed we've reduced cash salaries and replaced that cash, at a premium, with stock options.  Neither Matt nor Aggroed are immune to these drops along with the rest of the C-Suite and corporate leaders.  Further the equity being offered isn't dilution to all shareholders, but specifically from the equity owned by Matt and Aggy.  We're literally diluting ourselves so that we can keep as many team members in tact as possible.  Lastly, every person at the company, including those whose position was elimated were offered the opportunity if they could to stay on if they could accept 100% stock options as payment.  

In addition to cutting the size of the staff down we've gone through and reduced our reliance on third party contractors.  One of the biggest costs is legal.  Through our network we've been able to bring on board a experiencd attorney, a close friend, and pay 100% in equity.  This alone we suspect will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the coming year.

Lastly, we're actively renegotiating with our partners to reflect the current status of the market.  We're working on various terms and timelines to ensure that our business and buisness relationships can last while simultaneously honoring the current challenges of the market.

# Value of the Assets - Matt





# Raise Capital

We're working with our partners to raise capital for the business.  We've been mostly bootstrapping this company so far.  It's time that we take a little extra capital to help us grow.  These are incredibly difficult times to raise money, but we don't think it's impossible.  We have a great company, a great vision, a killer tech stack, and a layer 0 community that's literally to die for.  We'll find some financial counter parties come hell or high water and make sure that we're set to outlast the bear.  Cause if you don't know... what follows every bear market is a bull market.

# Benefits of this plan of action

By executing on this entire plan we'll be a in a position to 
- support our existing infrastructure
- continue building features in Splinterlands and Genesis League
- position ourselves to outlast this treacherous bear market
- grow our revenue without depleting our existing user base
- effiently plan and code our products

By executing on this plan we'll have some challenges
- we have to say goodbye to team mates we love and love working with
- we have to sacrifice some of the bells and whistles we'd like to get in 
- we may have to slow down a little

# What the future holds

We're optomistic about the future of cryptocurrency, nfts, and gaming.  We're positioning ourselves to be in the middle of all of that offering scalable products and services that other companies can't touch.  We are keeping not just a team to survive a nuclear fallout, but a group of professionals that even under tight circumstances can help us build killer products.  There's a bull market coming after this bear.  We hope to welcome back team members we're losing now in the bull market.

Please 
Send your love and gratitude for the excellence that this team has produced over the last year
Vote for your favorite brand name for us going forward
Kick ass on the field of battle, for glory, riches, and to own your future.
Cheer us on and 




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# Rebranding

Originally this game was called Steem Monsters.  We were based on the Steem blockchain and it made sense.  When we started incorporating other chains we realized the project was bigger than Steemmonsters and we rebranded the company to Splinterlands.  When we launched Genesis League Goals we inadvertendly grew out of our name as we're more than just Splinterlands and we plan to rebrand again.  It doesn't make much sense that a game of orcs and wizards will be the final home of a sports game, and the way the search engines work it doesn't make much sense for each game to live on it's own as each project will have a weaker SEO score and be harder to find than if they're all together.  So we need a mothership brand for the all stuff we hope to accomplish.

# Mothership Brand

So, this week we'll be putting up a SPS vote to decide if the company rebrands to XHalla/ZalHalla or Acyden.

XHalla/Zalhalla Brand Image
(Play, Die,) Play Again
The Anointed Rise
Be the legend

Acyden Brand Image
Own the Future

Over time we'll be migrating everything to one common website.  You'll see https://goals.genesisleaguesports.com turn into https://goals.genesisleaguesports.companyname.com/  Similarly splinterlands.com will turn into splinterlands.companyname.com.  By rebranding and combining all our web traffic onto one site we'll benefit from the modern format of SEO search and pull in more organic traffic.

# Increase Revenue

We want to increase revenue.  What we don't want to do is rush out a million presales to get there.  There's enough product on the shelves right now.  We're hoping to make it more attractive.  For example.  After the Lux Vega promo card is released we'll be releasing another promo card.  The only way to get it will be to purchase a pack between Date and Date XX.  You'll pay the normal price for a Tower Defense or Chaos Legion pack, and if you choose to spend an extra voucher you'll get a limited edition promo card as part of our end of year sale.

We've been hesitent to add any sort of advertisement into the game aside from tournament sponsorship, but going forward we're looking ranked battles and thinking through how we could add logos or product placement into the game for every match that's occuring.

Selling Project Anything-  We have a white label pack sale website in a box that not just our company can use, but other companies can use.  We're going to look at B2B sales.  We have a few projects that we know of that are looking for this where they would pay us to spin up a site where they can do a pack sale for their own community.  We can then work with them over time to figure out what other games or applications that we can do that are gated by the NFTs that the community owns.  This may turn out to be one of the best marketing projects we have too as each onboarded community would have single sign in capabilities with their hive accounts into games we're making on our own.  

We see these projects starting at $100k setup cost and requiring a revenue share starting at 15%.  Especially in the bear market we'd like to take some pressure off of our current community to fund the business and instead look to outside capital to fund us and grow the overall ecosystem.  If you know or have a project that you think could benefit from having your own pack sale website operated by our company team please contact me in discord.

# Be Efficient

One of the things I've noticed in our company is that we're very eager and at times we skip some planning to tell folks "just build X."  We then learn that X is a lot more complicated than we thought and requires a bunch of pre-requisites and other things in order to function.  We end up working at full speed and then having to go back and fix or entirely redo things multiple times, which may not have happened if we just took the time to plan up front.  My chemistry advisor used to smugly say "a month in the lab can save you a day in the library."  That's about the ratio we're looking for.  1 planning day per sprint or per month to make sure we're building things as few times as necessary.  This is part of the Agile process and something that we'll be doing more of for every project that enters ideation, design, prototyping, production, annoucements, and dev ops/ongoing development.

A lot of this change is behavioral.  So, one of the things I've been messaging and will continue to message is that the goal is to be a culture of planners.