Gold in Shadowrealm is a shared economy, not a personal score, and it is shaped by three things: what you earn, what the bank pays you to leave it alone, and what you lose to fees when you move it. The fees are not incidental. Over a trading career they are the difference between compounding and treading water.
Banked gold earns up to 1% per day. The important word is "up to": the rate is not flat. It scales down as your banked balance grows, so the first pile of gold you deposit earns at close to the headline rate while a vast hoard earns proportionally far less. The bank is designed to help a player building up, not to be an end-game money printer.
A deposit MATURES 23 hours after you make it, on your own clock. There is no shared hour when every vault in the realm pays out, so there is no particular time of day worth timing a deposit for, and no race against anyone else. Interest is paid ONCE, when your deposit matures, rather than trickling in while you play, and it is calculated on whatever is still in the vault at that moment, so gold you withdraw beforehand earns nothing at all.
Maturing also returns your balance to your on-hand gold. An untouched vault does not quietly compound forever in the background; if you want gold banked, you have to keep banking it. Collecting late costs you nothing, since a matured deposit pays the same whether you come back for it on time or a week later, but it does not keep earning in the meantime either.
Topping up a vault that has not matured yet restarts the clock for the WHOLE balance, old gold and new together, so a deposit already close to paying out can lose most of its wait if you add to it too soon. Wait for the "matures in" countdown to hit zero before depositing again if you want the earlier gold to pay out on schedule.
Sending gold directly to another player costs 4% of the amount, with a minimum of 1 gold. One permanent gem-shop unlock, the Courier's Favor, halves that to 2% for good. The fee exists to put friction on gold laundering between accounts, and it is charged on the sender, so the recipient always gets the round number you intended. The same fee is charged on any gold you put into a player-to-player escrow trade.
Listing an item on the marketplace costs 5% of the asking price, with a floor of 10 gold, and it is charged when you LIST, not when you sell. It is refunded in full if you cancel the listing and burned once the item actually sells, so repricing by cancelling and relisting costs you nothing but the time off the market. What the fee really taxes is selling, not experimenting. The Fence charges the same fee on conveyance listings, on its own separate listing cap.
The listing cap is the interesting one. It means market-making is a real decision rather than a matter of dumping inventory: with a limited number of slots, each one should hold something that will actually move. New players routinely fill all their slots with low-value commons and then cannot list the good drop they find an hour later.
Gear listed for sale is held in escrow while it waits, which means it cannot be equipped, upgraded, enchanted or salvaged until you take it back. If an item seems to be refusing an action, check whether it is still on the market.
Prices in Shadowrealm are set by players, so they move with what the player base is doing. Materials spike when a crafting tier becomes popular; mid-tier gear collapses in price whenever a lot of players are levelling through the same band. The reliable edge is not prediction, it is patience: holding an item until it is worth listing costs you nothing but a slot, and because a cancelled listing refunds its fee, a mispriced one costs only the time it spent not selling.