Space Communism vs Space Capitalism: How EVE Frontier Players Use Their Storage Units

So I've had this idea rattling around for a few weeks. EF-Map's Economy tab shows what goes in and out of storage on chain, and it's been pretty obvious that people are running their Smart Storage Units in quite different ways. Some put a market on them. Some put shared storage on them. Most just use them as a big box. I started calling it space communism versus space capitalism, half as a joke, and I wanted to see if that actually holds up once you look at the numbers instead of the sales pitch.

Everything here is EVE Frontier Cycle 7 so far, from 29 September to 26 October 2026, and it comes from the same on-chain events the Economy tab is built on. I had Claude go through every item stored, taken out or moved between inventories on a storage unit, and sort each one by which extension that unit was running at the time. There's a section at the end on how it was counted, because a couple of these numbers needed a bit of care.

Four ways to run a storage unit

The first is no extension at all. You anchor a unit, put your stuff in, take your stuff out. Other players can keep their own things in a separate slot on your unit, but nothing moves from one player to another. I'm calling these individuals, because that's what they are.

The second is a market, and the big one this cycle is Tri-Ex, or Trinary Exchange. As far as I can tell from its contract, you deposit items into a vault on the hub's storage unit and get a receipt back. The receipts are what get bought and sold on its order book, priced in its own currency, CRED, and the items stay in the hub until someone redeems a receipt and takes them out. There are a few other markets as well, including the Open Market in CivilizationControl, which I built. This cycle they barely register. Open Market has had 11 orders filled in four weeks, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The third is shared storage, which is what EF-Map's Shared Storage does. The unit's main hangar becomes a shelf. Anyone can take from it or put things on it through the app, and the owner stocks it by dragging items in as normal. Full disclosure, it's my tool, so take my enthusiasm for it with a pinch of salt. There are a couple of other shared storage tools around too. The biggest of those, EVE Datacore, is on 11 anchored units right now, and between them they move a lot less.

The fourth is SilverLink, built by the Silver tribe. Going in, I wasn't sure if it was a market or storage. Looking at its contract, it's shared storage with access lists. The owner decides which tribes or characters can use it, either as an allow list or a block list. So it's tribe storage, done properly.

The headline numbers

There are about 575 storage units anchored right now. 419 of them have no extension on them, 40 run Tri-Ex, 30 run EF-Map Shared Storage and 60 run SilverLink, and the rest are a handful of smaller tools. Of the roughly 220 million items stored on chain this cycle, 76.6% went into units with no extension.

Items that changed hands is the number I care most about for this. It's items that ended up with a different player from the one who put them in, so somebody parking ore and coming back for it later doesn't count. Tri-Ex comes out on top at about 2 million, with SilverLink and Shared Storage both at about a million each. Per character it looks different. 61 characters moved items through Tri-Ex, 33 through SilverLink and 15 through Shared Storage, so Tri-Ex and SilverLink both come to about 33,000 items per character and Shared Storage to about 67,000. So the bigger total is mostly more people rather than more per person, and Shared Storage is a small group moving a lot each.

Most of the frontier looks after itself

Most of the storing is done by individuals, by a long way. Units with no extension took 168.7 million items this cycle, and the 419 of them anchored right now belong to 186 different characters. Other players stored next to nothing in them, about 259,000 items, which is 0.15%. People mine, refine, park it, fly off and come back for it.

And honestly I think that's fine. A storage unit with nothing on it does exactly what most people need, and nobody has to trust anybody. I don't think it's the tools failing either. Only 125 characters moved items through any of these tools this cycle. I think a lot of people play solo or in small groups, so most of the time there just isn't anyone to hand things to.

What actually changes hands

What changes hands is the stuff people want and can't always get themselves. Crustal Anorthosite Crystals and Massive Ataxite Matrix, the two ores people are actually after, are the biggest group everywhere: 40% of what went through Tri-Ex, 45% on SilverLink and 28% on Shared Storage. Crustal Anorthosite on its own is the top item on all three. Fuel is next on Tri-Ex and SilverLink, and I've lumped Eupraxite and Sophrogon in with the fuels themselves because that's what they go into. Then there's the gate building material, Brine for Still Kernels, Kerogen Tar and Building Foam. It's only 3 or 4% by count, but if you're building a gate it's the bit that matters.

Tri-Ex has a lot more of two things than the others. One is Debris, about 153,000 of it. As I understand it Debris is mostly a starter area material, and from what I've seen Tri-Ex and Algorithmic Warfare (AWAR) spend a lot of time around the starter area, so that fits. The other is ammo. About 119,000 rounds moved through Tri-Ex, mostly Pyro and Slug Rounds, against about 31,000 on Shared Storage and very little on SilverLink. Shared Storage had the widest spread of items, 111 different types changed hands, against 105 on Tri-Ex and 84 on SilverLink.

The thing that mostly doesn't change hands is what the Economy tab is full of. Four minerals dominate it: Silicon Dust, Nickel-Iron Veins, Tholin Aggregates and Feldspar Crystal Shards. I'll call them the big four. They're kind of by-products, like the rest of the minerals from Platinum-Group Veins and Water Ice down to Hydrocarbon Residue, and everybody ends up with an excess of them. They're 70% of everything individuals stored, and about two thirds of what was stored on Tri-Ex and Shared Storage units too, but only 6% of what changed hands on Tri-Ex, 13% on SilverLink and 25% on Shared Storage. I suppose there's not much point trading something everybody already has.

Who it goes to

This is the figure I find most interesting. For each tool I took the items that ended up with someone other than the unit's owner, and checked whether that person was in the owner's tribe, or in the same alliance. Alliances aren't on chain, so I'm going on what I know: AWAR, Rift Riders, WILDFIRE and WOLF are allied, and so are Silver, The Saints and Shadow Moses. Clonebank 86, the starter corp, counts as no tribe here, because being in it doesn't mean you know each other.

SilverLink comes out at 88% within the tribe and 100% within the alliance. That's exactly what it's built for. The owner chooses who gets access, and the units are run by Silver and The Saints, so what comes out goes to their own people and their allies. It's tribe storage and it behaves like tribe storage.

Tri-Ex comes out at 89% within the tribe and 99% within the alliance, and it's almost all one tribe. Its hubs are run by at least seven tribes, with AWAR running 19 of the 40, but AWAR's hubs account for 98% of everything Tri-Ex hubs handed to other players, and 90% of that went to other AWAR members. The hubs other tribes run handed out a lot less, and 69% of it stayed in their tribe. It's the same the other way round. Of what other players put into Tri-Ex hubs, 91% came from the owner's own tribe and effectively all of it from the alliance.

Shared Storage comes out at 8% within the tribe but 96% within the alliance. Most of what crossed tribe lines was AWAR players using WOLF units, and those two are allied. So it's open to anyone, but in practice it's an alliance shelf like the others. It's 30 units and a small group of regulars, so I wouldn't read too much into it either way.

So once you count alliances, all three end up in much the same place, with between 96% and 100% of items staying inside the group. The obvious comeback for Tri-Ex is that its actual trading happens in receipts and CRED on its order book, so I've looked at that separately.

The order book

Tri-Ex's trading happens on its order book. You put items in a hub, get receipts, and the receipts are what get bought and sold, priced in CRED. All of that is on chain too, so I went through it. Every filled order records the item, the quantity, the price and the trading account on each side, and every trading account but one belongs to a player's wallet. The odd one out belongs to an AWAR organisation, which I'll come to. I left out 21 trades in the two currency pools, SUI and EVE against CRED, and 109 where a wallet traded with itself. That leaves 1,012 item trades this cycle, on 14 hubs, between 44 characters and that one organisation.

841 of those trades, 83%, were inside the AWAR alliance, and 769 of them were AWAR trading with AWAR, across 24 different AWAR characters. AWAR here includes an on-chain organisation called Algorithmic Warfare Officers, which has an eight-member board, all eight of them in AWAR now, and was on one side of 251 trades. Another 162 were the alliance trading with players still in Clonebank 86, the starter corp, and that part looks like a market doing exactly what a market is for, new players buying and selling with an established group. Only 6 were with another tribe, and 3 had nobody from the alliance on either side. 13 of the 14 hubs with any trading are run by AWAR members.

By CRED, the biggest thing on the book is Building Foam, 57% of all the CRED that changed hands, a lot of it from the first week when foam was scarce, which I'll come back to. Kerogen Tar is next at 5%.

So the order book tells the same story as the items. If you only count trades between two player tribes, 99% were within the same alliance.

One thing to be fair about. The tribes here are the ones players are in now, and a few of the traders joined AWAR during the cycle. At least 11 of the trades inside the alliance involved someone who was still in the starter corp at the time, so back then the inside figure was nearer 82%.

Market or internal economy?

So how much is Tri-Ex a market, and how much is it the AWAR alliance trading with itself? I think honestly it's a bit of both, and the chain shows which bit is which.

Prices first, because my first thought was that AWAR might be trading with each other at mates' rates. They're not, really. I compared the 18 items that traded at least three times both inside the alliance and with outsiders. Building Foam and Kerogen Tar went for exactly the same typical price both ways, 55,250 and 625 CRED a unit. Of all 18, 7 were within 10% of each other, 6 were dearer inside the alliance and 5 were cheaper.

The one big price swing is Building Foam in the first week, and that turns out to be the market working. From 4 to 8 October every foam trade went at 350,000 to 500,000 CRED a unit. Most of those were one AWAR player's standing buy orders on their own hubs, filled by tribe-mates hauling foam in. One of those sellers took over 1,000 foam to one of those hubs over the cycle, and the buyer took over 2,600 out of them. Then the price broke on 9 October and the foam turned up the day after. Daily volume went from roughly 100 to 300 units to 600 to 800, and the typical price dropped to around 45,000 to 57,000, where it's stayed, apart from a few of those old high buy orders still getting filled. That's price discovery, and it's the one thing I've seen Tri-Ex do that a shared shelf can't. A shelf can't get someone to haul a thousand foam to your hub this week.

AWAR's officers account looks like a tribe supply desk. It paid out about five times as much CRED as it took in, more than half of it for Building Foam, and 31% of what it paid went to players outside the alliance. With AWAR members it mostly sold, 103 of its 155 trades with them, and what it sold was mainly fuel. So it buys materials in and sells fuel on to its own people, which is pretty much what you'd want a tribe's buying desk to do.

Then there's the part that's clearly a market. 171 trades in the cycle had someone from outside the alliance on at least one side, from 14 different outside wallets, and nearly all of them were starter corp players. Outsiders mostly bought, 108 trades against 60, things like Feldspar Crystal Shards, Palladium, Nickel-Iron Veins, Pyro Rounds and D1 Fuel. What they sold was mostly Kerogen Tar and ammo by quantity, and Building Foam by CRED. In 155 of the 168 trades between the alliance and an outsider, the alliance had placed the order the outsider traded against, so the alliance is making the market and outsiders come to it. The outside share of trades peaked in the week of 12 October at 38%, and was 7% last week.

CRED is worth a word too. As far as I know, Tri-Ex and CRED were both set up by Hecate, who's in AWAR, and the order book looks to be built on DeepBook, Sui's open-source order book, with CRED doing the job DEEP does there. On chain, the admin and upgrade keys for Tri-Ex's contracts sit with a single developer wallet, which is normal for a tool someone's still building. The only on-chain pools for swapping CRED to SUI or EVE opened on 17 October, and Hecate was on one side of all 21 trades in them, and on both sides of 5. Players outside the alliance have been paid about 75 million CRED for items and spent about 35 million of it back, which leaves about 40 million they haven't spent on the book. To be fair, this is all testnet, so SUI and EVE aren't worth anything real either. Any of it is worth what someone will give you for it, and right now the someone for CRED is mostly AWAR.

So that's the split. Take the trades inside the alliance out, and Tri-Ex's book is about 6 trades a day over the cycle, with under a tenth of the CRED. That's still more than any other market I could see this cycle. It's just a lot smaller than the total suggests.

So is it communism or capitalism?

I think the honest answer is neither, really. The biggest group by miles is individuals looking after themselves, and that works. The tools that move items between players all end up in the same place once you count alliances, with 96% to 100% of items staying inside the group, whether it's a shelf, tribe storage or a market. The real line isn't communism or capitalism, it's who's in your alliance, and the only market trading that regularly crosses it is with brand new players in the starter corp. If anything, the frontier at the moment is a lot of homesteads and a few alliance warehouses, and one of those warehouses puts prices on things.

That's three different approaches, and I think Tri-Ex is the only one of the three that's built to scale to strangers. A shelf works when you trust whoever's taking from it, and access lists work when you know who to put on them, but a price lets two people who've never met trade without trusting each other. The trouble at the moment is that the strangers aren't there. 14 wallets from outside the alliance traded on it all cycle, and their share of trades was down to 7% last week.

It's also only four weeks of one cycle. I think a market needs a lot more people around before it really gets going, so I'd expect these numbers to move as more people turn up. I'll probably run it again at the end of the cycle and see what's changed.

How I counted

All of this comes from the Sui events EF-Map's indexer already collects for the Economy tab, from 29 September to 26 October 2026. Stored means items brought on chain from the game into a storage unit, same as the Economy tab. Each item counts under whichever extension its unit was running at that moment, so a unit that switched tools partway through counts under each one for its own stretch.

Items that changed hands is the trickier one. For each unit and each item type, I add up what each player received and what they gave, and only count what a player ended up with that they didn't put in. Storing and retrieving your own stuff cancels out, and a pooled vault like Tri-Ex's still only counts once. That makes it a floor rather than a total, and it's hardest on a busy market where the same people buy and sell the same item. Where I know two characters belong to the same player, moves between them aren't counted. Same tribe uses the tribe each character is in now, not when the items moved, and alliances are from what I know rather than anything on chain.

The order book numbers come straight from the chain, from Tri-Ex's filled-order events, with each trading account traced to the wallet that owns it and each wallet to a character. Trades by the Algorithmic Warfare Officers organisation count as AWAR because all eight of its board members are, and the organisation's own charter on chain carries the name. In 15 of its trades the officer who placed its order was also on the other side. I've left those in, and taking them out doesn't move the percentages. Only Tri-Ex has prices, in CRED, so the comparisons between tools are in items rather than value. That's why I've split things into item groups. If you run one of these tools and think I've got how it works wrong, let me know and I'll correct it.

Related Posts

Shared Storage: the Simplest Way to Share Items in EVE Frontier is how the shared shelf works, and why I built it the way I did.

Open Market: an EVE Frontier player market that is actually open is the market I built, for anyone wondering where those 11 filled orders happened.

Halfway Through Cycle 6: Seven Weeks of EVE Frontier Data is the last time I went through a cycle's on-chain data like this.

EVE Frontier Cycle 7 First Week: Flight, Mining and Fog of War is what the start of this cycle looked like from the player side.