# Impact of European Commission Crackdown on Virtual Currency in EVE Online?

**URL:** <https://forums.eveonline.com/t/impact-of-european-commission-crackdown-on-virtual-currency-in-eve-online/481245>\
**Category:** General Discussion\
**Tags:** payment\
**Created:** [March 27, 2025, 12:23am UTC](https://forums.eveonline.com/t/impact-of-european-commission-crackdown-on-virtual-currency-in-eve-online/481245 "2025-03-27T00:23:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 66

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**Author:** ![Elinore\_en\_Divalone](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/eveonline/user_avatar/forums.eveonline.com/elinore_en_divalone/32/507815_2.png) [@Elinore\_en\_Divalone](https://forums.eveonline.com/u/Elinore_en_Divalone)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2025, 11:22am UTC](https://forums.eveonline.com/t/impact-of-european-commission-crackdown-on-virtual-currency-in-eve-online/481245/66 "2025-04-02T11:22:53Z")

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PLEX is not a direct income for CCP. It is a kind of token for claiming service time (Omega) or cosmetics. The fact you can exchange it for ISK is irrelevant as CCP can only legally “book” it as an income when someone uses it in NES to redeem the token.

I’ve not made that up lol

> [@Pay with plex in NES for extra CCP Dev time](https://forums.eveonline.com/t/pay-with-plex-in-nes-for-extra-ccp-dev-time/414424/4):
>
> CCP treats plex as deferred income on their balance sheets. Plex represents a contract between the players and the company for 30 days of game time. While we buy and sell it for in-game currency, it only becomes real world revenue to them when someone redeems it for game time. Say, if there is $7 million total plex rolling around (this is a number I seem to recall) but only $1 million of it is redeemed in a year, CCP can only claim $1 million in revenue, and the rest is treated as a liabilit…

So “buying” PLEX with cash is a kind of loan to CCP 😛  
And by exchanging it for ISK you cede your right to hold CCP accountable to whomever receives that PLEX from you.

And you don’t get ISK from CCP, you get it from other players lol

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