The long drawn out wail

So finally the best known and highest profile Eve bank failure, EBANK, has called it a day. The saga is long and involved and I cbf linking to all the posts and all the drama, so I’ll provide a concise explanation.

I was going to say incompetence, or scamming but it is neither of those.  Essentially many unsecured loans were given out in the early days, which had no real hope of being paid.  The main person/s involved then left and EBANK had to pick up the pieces.

So fast forward a year or more until now and after some very hard in game work the remaining members, three I think, have made enough to pay back the investors a percentage of their money.

Just the fact that they are getting some or most of their money back confirms that EBANK was no scam but a genuine, if brave attempt, at introducing a bank into the Eve universe.  Was it doomed to fail?  I don’t think so, if run properly from the beginning then I believe it had every chance at success.  However their is a massive amount of trust involved and should even one of the EBANK directors wake up one day and decide, “You know what? Fuck it I’m gonna take the money and run!” then it all falls down.

I personally found that risk to be unacceptable and did not invest in EBANK or any other bank for the same reason, many others did.

According to a post from Ray McCormack linked above their are 1574 verified investors and 5690 non-verified investors, for a total of 7264 investors.  The total ISK remaining is 1,299,822,557,648.67 ISK and 626,956,849,110.37 respectively for a grand total of 1,926,779,406,759.04 ISK or nearly 2 TRILLION ISK.

30 Day PLEX at the moment are selling in Jita for a rounded figure of 360 Million ISK, EBANKS ISK would buy 5352 (rounded) PLEX (30 day $17.50 value as 60 day is $35 in the Eve Online store (doesn't include their ludicrous freight charges)) for a street value of approx $93,660 US dollars.

These figures obviously assume doing that amount of PLEX trading would not skew the PLEX market (it would) but I have to applaud the efforts of Ray and others to stick it out so long in the face of so much opposition.

Who said internet spaceships isn’t serious business?