How RiftEx works

A stock exchange for Capital Rift players. You buy and sell shares in other players' empires, and the price of a share is whatever people will pay for it.

Trading

You hold a cash balance on RiftEx, the same way you would at a broker. When your order matches someone else's, cash and shares change hands immediately — in the same instant the trade happens. There is no confirmation step, no waiting period, and nothing to do inside Capital Rift.

• A limit order trades only at your price or better. Anything it can't fill right away waits on the book until someone takes it.
• A market order fills straight away against the best prices available. The ticket shows the real average price before you commit, because a large order walks down the book and can end up well away from the top price.
• Placing an order reserves what it needs — cash for a buy, shares for a sell — so the same money can never be promised to two orders. Cancel and it comes straight back.

What a share is worth

Every listed empire pushes real fundamentals from the game through its owner's companion extension, so a price can be compared against something concrete:

• Book value — the empire's actual in-game net worth.
• P/B — market cap divided by book value. Below 1.00 means the market prices the company at less than the assets it owns.
• Daily yield — the last 24 hours of in-game income over market cap. It is not annualised on purpose: Capital Rift's economy turns over roughly 3.6% of its net worth every day, so a yearly number would read in the thousands of percent and tell you nothing.

Why an extension is needed at all

Every Capital Rift API endpoint returns 401 without a live session cookie, and the game sends no CORS headers. A hosted server therefore cannot read game data — not with an API key, not by scraping. The only party who can read your account is your own browser, so the extension reads it and pushes a small summary here. It reads only your own account and never writes to the game.

Funding your balance

This is the one place RiftEx touches the game economy, and it is a plain player-to-player transfer. You link your Capital Rift username, ask for a deposit, and RiftEx gives you an exact amount to send to its account in game. A moderator confirms the transfer arrived and credits your balance. Withdrawals run the other way: RiftEx transfers the money back to your username.

The amount you are given has a few odd cents on the end — $500.07 rather than $500.00. That is a reference tag, not a charge: you are credited the round amount you asked for. Two players depositing “$500” the same afternoon are indistinguishable by amount, and the tag makes an arriving transfer belong to exactly one request. Together with the sender's name, that is two independent signals a moderator checks against each other rather than trusting either alone.

Your first approved deposit also verifies your game account. Typing a username proves nothing — anyone can type any name — but causing money to leave that account is something only its owner can do. Until that has happened, RiftEx will not transfer anything out to the name, because a payout to an unproven address is a payout to a stranger.

Earlier versions of RiftEx had to route deposits through a commodity item, because the game capped player-to-player transfers. That rail was permanently unsafe — a market buy matches the cheapest ask rather than a chosen seller, so any rival undercutting RiftEx would have taken the depositor's money in a perfectly valid trade. Uncapped transfers removed the problem rather than mitigating it: a transfer is addressed to a player, so it cannot reach anyone else.

What you are trusting

RiftEx keeps the share register and your cash balance, so you trust it the way you would trust any exchange to keep score honestly. What you do not have to trust is the player on the other side of a trade: reservations mean nobody can sell shares they don't have or spend money they don't have, and settlement is immediate, so there is no window in which someone can fail to pay.