Le Marché Gelé

Le Marché Gelé was a petition, filed on 31 July 2026 by the citizen FatPenguin, who wrote that they were stacked with shavings and that Graine Wetsky was lowballing them. It carried at 23:54 UTC on 26 August with 180 Seals from forty citizens—the second-highest threshold Le Council had ever set—and Ⱡ1,008,649,661 behind it, ten times what was asked and at the time the largest sum ever placed behind a filing. It opened the next morning.

Le Council has not addressed FatPenguin’s complaint. It has built a room in which it need not be addressed to Le Council.

O.F.F.R.E.

The Office for the Fair Facilitation of Reciprocal Endowment was seated on the morning the Marché opened, and administers it. Le Council does not administer it. Le Council wishes this understood before anything else.

O.F.F.R.E. does not set prices. It holds both halves and records what two citizens agreed to.

La Glacière

What O.F.F.R.E. holds, it holds in la Glacière. A half put up is frozen where it sits rather than moved:

Shares stay in your name. A share in la Glacière still collects its dividend and still carries its vote at the S.H.I.F.T.. It has not left you. It has been spoken for—and it cannot be sold or donated while it is.
Cards stay in your binder, marked Listed, and cannot be recycled while the offer stands.
Shavings stay in your name, frozen.
Looneys leave your balance and come back when the offer does.

Withdraw before anyone accepts and your half is returned entire. The filing fee is not returned. It is what a place on the book costs.

Offers and counters

Anyone may take an offer at its ask. Anyone may also counter it with a different half, which goes into la Glacière on the same terms. Only the citizen who filed the offer may accept a counter, and when they do, every other counter is released and returned unasked.

The petition proposed a straight offer, taken or not taken. Le Council added the counter, observing that a marketplace in which the only two answers are yes and nothing is one in which most of what could be agreed is not.

Every offer carries a date on which it lapses.

What it costs

At opening, the rates were:

Ⱡ100 to file an offer. Burned, never returned.
2% of what each side receives, on settlement. This is the Exchange’s own brokerage, charged on both halves, so passing a position to a neighbour is never cheaper than passing it through the pool.
A share leg pays whichever is greater: that commission, or the team’s current Open Ice Levy band—the schedule that rises as a register empties. A share changing hands between citizens never touches the pool, and Le Council ruled that the brake on accumulation is not something two willing citizens may agree their way around.

The rate is quoted when the offer is filed and does not move afterwards. O.F.F.R.E. does not send a supplementary bill.

Le Council called these figures provisional when the Marché opened, and undertook to put them to a Consultation once there was a week of trading to look at. The filing fee and the commission have both risen since. About Le Marché Gelé carries the rates in force.

Only the gap is counted

Every citizen carries a rolling transfer window. The opening notice described it as the same allowance a donation spends; O.F.F.R.E. now keeps its own ceilings for the Marché (below). At the Marché, only the unmatched part of a trade spends it.

A deal whose two halves are marked at the same figure costs none of the window, however large it is. An honest trade has no ceiling, and a controlling stake may genuinely change hands. A lopsided one spends window equal to the difference, at exactly the rate a donation of that difference would. Le Council’s reasoning is that a trade is a gift plus consideration, and only the gift-shaped part is any of its business.

O.F.F.R.E. raised its ceilings at 17:09 UTC on 2 September 2026, to Ⱡ100,000,000 of net value a day and Ⱡ250,000,000 a week. The next offer went up at 18:25. Le Council reported both timestamps and drew no line between them.

How a half is valued

Looneys at face.
Shares at spot on the Exchange, read at the moment of settlement.
Ice Shavings at what Graine Wetsky Funds would pay for them—the only standing bid a kcup has.
Cards at replacement cost: what the card scraps for at the Recycler, lifted by what a Blister costs over what a Blister scraps for, and reduced by its condition. A marked offer of a Worn card will say it is Worn.

Marks move; rates do not. An offer’s page shows what it was marked at when filed and what it is marked at now.

Cards on the Marché

A card is the one thing here that is not interchangeable, so the two halves name it differently.

You put up a specific card out of your binder—that serial, that finish, that condition. You ask for a card out of the catalogue, and whoever takes the offer chooses which of their copies fills it. That is why you may ask for a card nobody has struck yet, and why an offer for “a Legendary” is an offer anyone holding one can take. Editions such as S03P appear in the picker beside the season.

Both binders must have room for what they are about to receive.

The roll

Nothing settled at the Marché moves a team’s reserve, and nothing settled there is published as the price of anything. The tape belongs to the Exchange. The Marché has a roll instead.

The Roll of Offers is public. It records every deal O.F.F.R.E. has settled, both halves, what each was marked at, and the gap between them. This is Le Council’s entire answer on the question of trade fairness. O.F.F.R.E. does not judge a price. It records one, where everyone can see it.

The gates

Two halves, two different assets. The same asset may not appear on both sides. “A trade is not a donation.”
Each half must be worth at least Ⱡ100, unless it names a card.
Accounts must be seven days old, and must have placed a bet or traded on the Exchange, before filing.
A cap on what you may have open—ten offers and twenty counter-offers at opening.
One team to a citizen. O.F.F.R.E. refuses a settlement that would take whoever is receiving shares past the cap, on the same terms S.L.U.S.H. refuses the purchase. See one team to a citizen.

What the room has seen

The Marché settled two deals on its opening afternoon and nothing at all until the ceilings rose. In the week to 6 September it settled eleven, and every one was Looneys for kcups. Twice, a citizen paid Ⱡ20,000,000 for 5,000 kcups—Ⱡ4,000 each, against the Ⱡ369 the Funds were bidding for the same commodity.

Then the Confrérie opened, and the room filled with cards. Of the sixty-three deals in the week to 13 September, forty-nine involved one.

At 03:06 UITC on 21 September, a Legendary card of the Season 2 Final—Medellín’s 12-11 over Tokyo—in print number one changed hands for Ⱡ750,000,000, under the note “Legendary #1.” It is the most Le Marché Gelé has settled for a single card.