From the NY Times, Rob Cox writes about A Virtual Bank With Real Woes, in the virtual world of EVE Online:
Central to Eve’s strategy, players develop economies within an "anything goes" free-market framework that allows them to expand their fleets, buy weaponry and equipment and bolster defenses. Indeed, Eve has 66 marketplaces for some 5,000 items, with more than a million transactions a day.
Enter Ebank, this virtual universe’s online bank. Because players often do not have the interstellar credits...they need to expand their fleets, an enterprising player created a bank that would accept deposits and lend to players who would pledge assets, like their spacecraft, as collateral.
The bank was a success....Ebank accumulated about 8.9 trillion ISK in deposits in 13,000 accounts belonging to 6,000 users. That was far more than it was able to lend out — there were around 1 trillion ISK of loans.
Somewhere along the way Ebank’s top executive, who went by the online handle Ricdic...made off with deposits, which he then sold for real cash to gamers on a sort of black-market exchange separate from Eve.
[Game developer] CCP kicked Ricdic out...Ebank has temporarily shut down while its board of directors...tries to sort out the mess. Depositors, meanwhile, appear to have pulled 5.5 trillion ISK of deposits.
Virtual world economies are pretty fascinating systems and definitely worth following. I think if such arenas interest you, you've just got to get in there and start learning the lay of the land. But, as the above tale indicates, bringing in knowledge from the outside world will be necessary if you plan on such ambitious schemes as virtual world financial services.
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