Lots of Splinterlands fans have been really excited about recent price action in DEC. Between high demand because of SPS airdrops, combined with the end of the dice sale, DEC has skyrocketed. With these prices, people can actually make some nice cash just by playing!
Supply and Demand
But as it stands, there's no way that DEC would continue at this price, while we continue to see large DEC payouts from wins on Splinterlands. It would require keeping a large portion of DEC out of circulation. Price is all about supply and demand, after all. If large rewards pools are given every day, then supply is going to increase. As supply increases, price drops.
That's actually how DEC is set up. It's designed to try to maintain that $0.001 peg. It's just that things are too crazy for the system to keep up right now. The thing about just pegging it to something like $0.01 is that once demand drops, the payouts will drop with it. We won't be any better off.
Third Party Items
That's where third party items come in. While any branded products would require approval from the Splinterlands team, whales, and other fans with the resources to do so, should be working with Splnterlands to create merch. Either the merch could be purchasable exclusively using DEC, or buyers could receive a discount if they pay in DEC. Either way, merch like mugs, shirts, and even figures, can be incredibly useful for increasing demand for DEC.
There's a lot of content from Splinterlands already. The world of Splinterlands is fairly robust, so there's a lot to work with. People can write entire comics based on the lore. And the Splinterlands team should be networking with third party content creators to make this happen.