Financial Instruments in Eve Online

I have been looking into if we can use the Contracting system to have financial instruments in Eve.


The beauty of the Courier Contracting system is that the use of collateral is the enforcement mechanism . . . . i.e. make good your promise or lose your collateral, and no scam that i know of can get around that.

For example, as an idea for a financial instrument, lets say someone buys a Plex each month to finance their account and they were concerned that Plex was going to rise from 1bn to say 1.1bn over the month - would they be willing to pay 30m to give them the right to buy the Plex at 1bn?  I.e. would they be willing to buy an Option for 30m that would allow them to buy that Plex for 1bn?

Now, there would be two ways i can see would could do this . . . . . but we cant.


Using a Courier Contract with negative Fees

If i could create a courier contract to transfer 1 Plex, with collateral of 1.0bn and fees of -30m . . . . . trouble is that i can not set the fees on a courier contract to a negative number.  I.e. i can not set up a courier contract where the taker of the contract pays me to deliver the item.

For reference, the way that this courier contract would work is that the taker of the contract would put 1bn into Collateral escrow and pay me 30m in fees.

If Plex rose above 1.03bn then they would fail the contract, lose the 1.0bn collateral but gain the Plex.  In this case they were correct to take the contact where as the creater of the contract would lose a Plex and gain 30m + 1.0bn ISK - so if Plex rose to say 1.1bn the creater of the contract would lose 70m.

If Plex failed to rise to 1.03bn then they would deliver the contract get their 1.03bn ISK back and buy the Plex in the open market, so have lost their 30m fees they paid the creater.  The creater would make a gain of 30m ISK.


Using a Courier Contract wrapped in an Item Exchange Contract.

If i could create a Courier Contract to deliver 1 Plex with no Collateral and Fees of 1.0bn, have that contract accepted by an alt of mine which then puts it into an Exchange Contract with a cost of 1.03bn then that would have the same effect as the above . . . . trouble is that the person the takes on the Exchange Contract is not able to deliver the Courier Contract (i.e. the Courier Contract can only be completed by whoever accepted it).


Shame really.  With a little tinkering of the Courier Contract system then we could have all sorts of fun up and running.  Including a lending market.