Gold, Banking and Trading

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, where each side can offer up to 9,999,999,999 gold.

Listing an item at a fixed price 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.

• Prices run from 10 gold to 99,999,999 gold.
• You may hold 10 active listings at once, before any Marketplace Expansion slots bought with shadowgems.
• Every listing costs 5% up front, minimum 10 gold.

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.

Instead of a fixed price you can list a piece of gear as an auction, lasting 1, 2, 3, 5 or 7 days. Auctions are for gear only; materials and gemstones trade on the Material Market. You set a starting bid and a Buy Now price, and the starting bid must be lower than the Buy Now price. Players bid against each other; when the time is up the highest bid wins the item. If nobody bids, the item comes back to you and it cost you nothing.

• Listing an auction is free. The usual sale fee (the same percentage, minimum and Merchant's Blessing as a fixed listing) is taken from the final price only if it sells, so an unsold auction costs nothing.
• A bid takes its gold at once. If someone outbids you, your gold goes straight back to your purse.
• The first bid must be at least the starting bid. Each new bid must beat the last by at least 5% (and at least 10 gold).
• Buy Now stays open until the first bid is placed, and a bid that reaches the Buy Now price is treated as a Buy Now purchase. After the first bid, Buy Now disappears and the auction runs to its end, so the price can climb past the Buy Now figure.
• A bid in the last 10 minutes pushes the end of the auction out to 10 minutes after that bid, so nobody can win by sniping the final second.
• You cannot cancel an auction once it has a bid. You cannot bid on your own auction, and a loan or debt blocks bidding like it blocks buying.
• Auctions count towards your active listing cap, and the item is held in escrow while the auction runs.

The Bank lends gold for 1 day at 3%, 3 days at 6%, 7 days at 10%. You repay the amount you borrowed plus that percentage of it by the due date, and you can have one loan at a time. The smallest loan is 100 gold, and your account must be at least 7 days old. You cannot borrow while jailed or while in debt.

Your limit is the smaller of two numbers: a cap set by your highest rank (scaled up by inflation), and 50% of the gold you hold on hand and in the bank.

Miss the due date and the Bank collects whatever gold you have. What is still missing becomes a debt, and you are jailed for 1 hour (starting the moment you are back if you were offline). While you owe, 50% of the gold you earn goes to the Bank, and a deposit pays the debt first. You also cannot pay bail, send gold, wager on duels, offer gold in trades, buy from the Gear Market or buy gems with gold until it is cleared. You get a letter either way.

One auction runs for the whole realm at a time, for 7 days. Highest bid wins, and the winning bid is destroyed, so it is a true gold sink. Anyone who is outbid is refunded at once, so nobody is ever out of pocket for losing.

• A legendary gear piece: 60% of auctions, opening bid 100,000 gold.
• A mythic gear piece: 35% of auctions, opening bid 300,000 gold.
• A single Godshard: 5% of auctions, opening bid 1,000,000 gold.

Each new bid must beat the current one by 10% (at least 10,000 gold). A bid in the last 10 minutes pushes the end back by the same amount, so nobody can win with a last-second bid. The page shows the last 5 winning prices.

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.