Currency Exchange

“

Did you know that you can exchange gold for gems and vice versa? Within the Black Lion Trading Post you can click on the Currency Exchange tab and swap your currencies!

— Currency Exchange

Gem Store banner.

Currency Exchange allows players to trade coin for gems and vice versa.

Access

The currency exchange is accessed from the second tab () in the Black Lion Trading Company panel. The panel is accessed clicking the icon in the toolbar or the hotkey (default O).

Mechanics

Interface

Custom amount

The initial interface panel displays standard exchange amounts and how many coins or gems are required for purchase. Click on "Buy" next to the desired transaction to complete the purchase, or "Custom Exchange" at the bottom to buy arbitrary amounts.

• Gold exchanges include intervals of 1, 10, 50, 100, 250, and custom
• Gem exchanges include intervals of 400, 800, 1200, 2000, and custom

• Exchange rates are determined by supply and demand from players. Since supply and demand affects the rate, the ratio can shift rapidly depending on market conditions, especially when the Gem Store adds new items.
  • The exchange has a supply of both Gems and Gold. When you trade to the exchange you influence the supply of each. The exchange rate is relative to current supply of each. The price changes geometrically as one pool empties creating a better exchange rate for the low supplied currency. The supplies are contained entirely within the exchange.
  • Due to currency exchange inflation, the value of purchased gems has increased over time. Conversely, the value of in-game gold used to purchase items in the Gem Store has decreased.

Fees

• There is a 17.5% transaction fee applied to any trades. For example, exchanging 1  gives 82  50  worth of gems while reselling those gems returns only around 68 , resulting in a net loss of roughly 32%. [citation needed]
• The server sets a minimum value on all exchanges and lacks the ability to divide some numbers smaller than whole numbers. This seems to effectively mean that the minimum transaction fee is 1 gem.
• When converting gold to gems, an extra +1 gem fee is applied.^{[verification requested]}
• As a result of the minimum fee and the fixed surcharge, trading for tiny amounts of currency results in disproportionally expensive conversions.
• A transaction only buying a single gem will effectively pay for 3 gems. This can also be observed from a transaction for 4 gems (paying for 6) costing twice as much as the transaction for a single gem.

Anomaly:

The integer transaction fee has variable breakpoints, and old prices are cached for a short while, so increasing gem count by 1 may show a cheaper price. (Observed 99 gems at 1  more than 100.)

Notes

• Players are limited to exchanging 9,999  or 999  in any single transaction.
• To help combat botting and scams, there is a delay of 72 hours after creating a new account before currency can be exchanged.
• Gems to gold exchange is available for free accounts but gold to gems exchange is unavailable.
• The currency supply pool used to determine the exchange rate is limited to the North American/European servers. The Chinese servers use a separate pool.

Trivia

Old Currency Exchange panel

• The October 21, 2014 game update overhauled the exchange UI:
  • The previous version required the user to input how much they wanted to pay, instead of how many gems/coins they wanted. (The API endpoints still uses this old convention.)
  • Prior to this, price trends for the last five days were displayed.
  • The feature to exchange custom amounts was removed, instead only allowing trades at fixed breakpoints of 400s. After player backlash, the custom exchange was reintroduced after 9 days.

See also

• API:2/commerce/exchange — API endpoints for the current exchange rates.

External links

There is no official price history, but graphs can be found on unofficial sites:

• gw2efficiency.com | Gem price history
• gw2tp.com | Gem price history