Provide a currency to ease trade in the belt that can be broadly accepted and regarded as safe and reliable for general use.
Why?
There are many reasons for someone to prefer not to spend ETH directly, both viewing it as essentially "real money" or at least real value, concern over price volatility against their local currency, or less subjectively Taxation as different areas could conceivably presently or within the lifetime of the game regard such spending of Crypto as taxable events.
Additionally many may simply subjectively prefer a currency for In-Game purchases to be derived from in-game value, and barter, particularly in a context where there are a great many different possible materials and subjective valuations, Barter could be profoundly inconvenient and frustrating.
I have not fully adapted or thought out how this idea fits in with the SWAY Token. I do think this could still have a use case as a competing/alternative emergent currency. there may be additional implementations of such features or reasons this might be useful that I haven't thought of.
To select a basket of materials of a variety of rarities, uses and sources (link for further discussion of balancing/elements) and fixing the value of a set quantity of the currency to that set basket, and build infrastructure that would allow for customers to acquire the fixed measure of currency by depositing single or multiple sets of the backing basket, OR to cash in currency and receive a basket accordingly. This would ensure a relatively stable and reliable value as increased value will be met with people depositing baskets and increasing supply, and decreased value will result in people redeeming currency and reducing supply of currency.
If possible, Automation of Currency Generation/Redemption, and public visibility of the inventory of banked materials and circulating supply of currency could allow for transparency in the reliability of the bank, and unbiased availability of the service.
Selecting the Currency's material backing is likely one of the most difficult aspects of establishing a currency with this method.
The basket would strive to represent all asteroid types, all economically significant resource categories, all rarities, and all economic demands. This will somewhat depend on the ratios of what materials are used in practice and how availability pans out. See below for further speculation.
some of these may already be planned features/functionality. In large I try to frame these as functions that could be broadly implemented rather than uniquely supporting this application.
Market/Bank Interface:
Functionality in the market interface to buy/sell fixed bundles conveniently and repeatedly. this sort of bundling option
could have a variety of uses for creative merchants.
Functionality in the market interface to create/dispsense crypto token(or similar) formatted currency in a transaction.
Possibly this could also allow purchase of things that could be applied like membership cards or other creative use of such tokens.
Functionality to conditionally burn affiliated currency received?
General market accessibility to spend/receive tokens of this sort and assess fees, rebates or other price modifications if attached to said currency or token.
Storage:
Its a given that there will be various storage options in the game. But for something like this to be sufficiently trustworthy when combat is introduced, it may require or highly benefit from somewhat niche storage options, or options that would not be worthwhile in most use cases. Such as:
Storage that trades accessibility for inviolability. that destruction would require rebuilding, but not give up its contents when destroyed. but that withdrawals from such storage require a time gate. "Flavor Text" of the contents being lowered deep into the asteroid such that removing it is a slow process and attack would only further bury the vault. An alternative option for this tradeoff might be an option to restrict a storage space or part of a storage network to be only accessed via a market/bank terminal and not able to be added to or removed from otherwise. this could also provide social security in that a storage situation configured this way would also restrict the operator of that bank/market from tampering with the deposited material.
Storage density. In addition to the obvious "just more space" options of large warehouse storages, for this sort of "institutional use" a facility that could spend time/energy to compress large quantities into a form that is more compact but must have energy and time spent to decompress before being otherwise useful. This could also possibly be implemented as a way to increase security if it provides a way to turn large volumes of homogenous material into a unit that cannot be fit into any but extremely large, purpose built, or any ships.
Options for off-site visibility/interpretation to follow through on Transparency of inventory and auditability.
Any application of fees would need to be variable according to preference of the currency management.
I think that it would be important for adoption to allow a person to accept payment in this sort of currency, and have at least one path of redeeming it without any fees being charged to them. I think that this would be satisfied by any fees being charged by the person paying the Currency, and for creation/redemption of the currency at the bank to be fee-free. But beyond that, I think that a small % fee on external transactions to be split between the bank itself and as a payment to the manager(s) of said currency for their time and effort. Or perhaps structured as a DAO to determine fees and their uses.
A fee that would be returned to the bank, could give the managers a budget with which to expand and improve bank facilities, help build market liquidity and stability, and deflate currency supply/reduce stagnant stock of backing materials if called for.
Inflation Management:
In the real world, a 100% material backed currency would be functionally deflationary, but the large scale, continuously renewing resources of the game world would inevitably result in over time, there being a degree of inflation. While this would be mitigated to an extent by the floor provided by the redeemability of the currency, over time this could conceivably still be an issue at least in an increase in how effective a given basket valuation might be over time. (eventually potentially causing a storage problem)
In a situation where a drastic revaluation is necessary, a bank should be able to establish a new currency with new valuation parameters. the previous version could be phased out by turning off deposits for that currency, and encouraging redemptions with bonuses for redemption and re-investment into the new currency.
After circulation was reduced sufficiently, scrapping the old currency for a direct redemption for the revalued version. ideally such a case should be planned ahead and conditions given accordingly from the beginning.
Another option would be to allow a margin of allowance to periodically increase(but not decrease) material value on the standing currency could possibly allow the bank management to adjust the valuation to market state. as long as the bank was able to acquire the backing material to secure the increase could be withstood to a 100% redemption, this likely should be acceptable as those who were already holding currency would have an increase in minimum value, and if announced ahead of time, there should be a minimal amount of people who might feel shorted on their deposit being slightly less effective than expected. the bank could conceivably set up a margin where they could help those who needed it in the transition.
If possible an anti-inflation measure could be either automatically by some mechanism, or manually with a planned provision, where periodically an amount of Currency could be used to raise the value of the basket and existing currency.
starting with a larger relative basket would allow for more incremental increases (ie: 10 units of the most rare item would make it easier to increase valuation 10% evently across the basket than if it was 1 unit per basket) and allow for finer gradation with fewer decimal divisions.
Many years ago there was an indie MMO called "A Tale in the Desert" that did not have any NPC Currency, and the solution that someone came up to was setting up a bank using a clever implementation of chest permissions to allow delayed, but unattended deposits and withdrawls, and established a scheme where a small set of goods would be valued at a certain rate. This game, being set in ancient egypt, had a much more simple resource list compared to what one would expect from a Sci-Fi game. but it was effective in establishing a basis that could be used for valuation and communication. In that game, the actual currency as very rarely actually used, but the valuation based upon that currency was the common standard upon which most people negotiated bartering.
I think that in this game, and with Crypto, it should be possible to make a more directly usable currency based on a similar principle and taken to the next level and actually be used.
you can reach me at KuroFukkatsu on Discord.