Linden Lab Raising Fees to Buy Lindens, Will Raise Fees to Sell

By Bixyl Shuftan

Second Life is getting more expensive for it's residents. On the Linden blog yesterday, they announced that they were "making multi-million dollar investments in Second Life that will benefit Residents in the near and long term, while also ensuring that the virtual world’s bright future ahead is even more awesome than its 14+ year history has been. Exciting times!" This was followed by an announcement that there would be "Updates to LindeX and Credit Processing Fees."

Underlying SL’s user-to-user economy and the ability to buy and sell L$’s for real currency is a significant amount of ongoing work to ensure that everything remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations, while also preventing fraud and money laundering. This work comes at a cost, and we are adjusting related fees in order to help cover those costs and enable us to continue to invest in Second Life’s future.

Starting yesterday, the fee for buying Linden dollars over the Lindex rose from 60 cents to 99 cents per transaction, an increase of about two-thirds. Starting on January 3, the fee for selling Linden dollars will go from 1.5% per transaction to 2.5 percent, and the $25 USD cap on fees per transaction will be removed.

At least one Second Life businessman has responded to these increases. Oobleck Allagash, a co-owner of KraftWork and PocketGacha, commented in New World Notes that the Lab had "attacked those who work to create the SL economy by raising the fees to process payments nearly 67% overnight, but more importantly, removing the $25 cap which will, for larger brands, result in exorbitant additional costs." He questioned the reason for the increases, "what work has changed specifically that will require LL to generate millions more a year annually? Sounds a bit more like those that drive the SL economy are in fact now paying for the failure of Sansar."

The Lab did mention one way it had been trying to protect inworld businesses, "Recently, we closed an exploit that fraudulent gacha re-sellers had used. Our governance team can now catch them when they attempt the cheating method that we have already fixed." Though this alone isn't an explanation for why such a large increase.




To read the Linden's blog post in full, Click Here.

Bixyl Shuftan