Vaerah's services: Collateral Holding

Introduction

Collateral Holding is one of the EvE^® Online meta professions. For a brief background about EvE meta professions please look here.

While having the lowest entry barrier among the meta professions, Collateral Holding still requires complete trust by all the involved parties. Sometimes the assets values involved in the transactions may reach above 100 billion ISK.

Even a smaller collateral may still be worth some billions. Not everybody may be trusted with such amounts, therefore the Collateral Holders are not a large number.

What is Collateral Holding?

Collateral Holding is a particular kind of Third Party Service. A Collateral Holder generally acts as middle-man between two parties with no trust relationship. He will hold a valuable item or escrow for the duration of a business between two parties. The Collateral Holder has to be fully trusted by both the other two parties for this kind of business to work.

Most of the Third Party Service characteristics apply to Collateral Holding. The Holder guarantees that the transaction between the two other parties will be smooth and secure. There are usually pre arranged plans to engage in case something goes wrong. Like for a Third Party Service, a Collateral Holder completely relies on his reputation to be completely flawless. Earning trust in EvE takes years, irreversibly losing it takes few seconds.

There are several variations of this service and several kind of assets that may be involved.

The most common transactions involving a Collateral Holder are:

Bonds and IPOs posting collateral.
Collateralized loans.
Collateralized services.
T2 BPOs sales.
Corporations (the Collateral Holder is made CEO and locks down BPOs used as collateral).
Lotto prizes.
Certain Wormhole operations.

The most common items held as collateral are:

Faction and officer fit ships.
T2 BPOs.
Capital parts BPOs.
Large amounts of inexpensive, quickly sold items.
Speculative items (see Insurance).
Bookmarks.

Vaerah Vahrokha‘s Collateral Holding services cover every kind of collateralized operation and any kind of held collateral except Titans.

In particular, her specialty are finance related collaterals. Besides the classic “middle-man between two parties” assignments, Vaerah will also directly post collateral for her own business (example: collateralized customers BPOs taking and research) or provide loans to customers able to post collateral.

Typical Collateral Holding workflow

The following is a typical suggested sequence of tasks to perform in order to complete a transaction by using a Collateral Holding Service. It is very similar to the Third Party Service procedure except for the fact Collateral is usually returned to the original owner. Please notice how the sequence may take vast modifications depending on the exact transaction kind and on the possibility for some of those transactions to happen between two actors and not three.

For publicly tracked transactions / lottos, create a transaction prospectus draft but do not post it right now. Many hastily cobble a terrible prospectus together, post it on the forum and act surprised when it invariably gets flamed by other players. Don’t do that, it’s possible you won’t even get the Collateral Holding Service to accept working for you.
Contact a Collateral Holder. Have ready the details including possible requests about what to do in case something goes wrong. Certain jobs will require to share your characters or corporations API keys with the Service itself. API keys are created at this EvE Online web site page. Examples of such jobs are: bonds, loans, IPOs and lottos collateral holding, whenever the second party fails to publicly acknolwledge the succesful return of their money (plus interests) / items.
The Collateral Holder will state the fee for his work. The fee is usually paid by the swap / investment issuing party.
Listen to the possible Holder suggestions and criticism and update the prospectus (public transactions) accordingly and send the new draft revision to the representative for further review.
After prospectus is OK, proceed posting it (public transactions). The Collateral Holder will usually add his own confirmation.
The first party contracts / sends the item(s) / securities plus fee to the Collateral Holder (some times the fee is paid at collateral restitution time).
The Collateral Holder will post (public transactions) or contact the second Party and clear them to send the agreed money / other items to the first party.
The collateralized business starts and matures / gets done.
The first party confirms (and, for public transactions, posts on the forum about) the succesful business outcome and sends the original money / items (plus interest, in case of loans and bonds) back to the second party. Once the second party acknowledges receipt of the due money / items, the Collateral Holder will deliver the held item(s) / securities back to the first party and (for public transactions) post about the succesful operation on the forum.
In the first party states they sent back the due money (plus interest) / items but the second party does not acknowledge receipt of it / those, then the Collateral Holder will need first party’s API keys in order to confirm that a first party’s character indeed gave the due stuff back. Lottos usually require this step, as the winners most often won’t confirm they received a prize.

Collateral Holding gotchas and cautions

Do not trust the first guy pretending he is a trusted Collateral Holder! EvE does not punish scammers and thieves. You are meant to do your due diligence and find out who you may trust. Collateral Holding Services often are long time, established one man operations.
Do not trust the first guy pretending to be a celebrity Collateral Holder! While EvE End User License Agreement forbids character impersonation, there have been many attempts at creating characters with the same name of famous Collateral Holding representatives except for a letter, replacing an “O” with a zero and so on.

Known and less known Collateral Holders

Here is a list of Collateral Holding Services. It’s in alphabetical order so not to hurt anyone’s sensibility. Notice how some of them may be currently inactive or have only held (multi-billions) collateral for a couple of times.

Chribba
Darkness
Flakeys
Grendell
RAW23
Shar Tegral
Vaerah Vahrokha
Wirox Crotikus