My view is probably influenced by the way stuff has tended to happen in the
Galactic Milieu, where most of the time most of the currency doesn't hit the markets at all. Most currency conversion happens like the way it happens at gas stations along the U.S. / Canada border or at a local branch of your bank when you go in to buy a bit of foreign currency to take with you on vacation or whatever. You look on a currency conversion chart or even watch the news or a newspaper to see what today's price is, add a service fee markup and pow it is done.
Every few months or so though some of the Nations or Corps find they have accumulated more of some of the currencies of the other Nations or Corps than they want to hold in their treasury as backing with which to back their own currency so they approach the issuing Nation about selling it back to them, usually preferably for some of the approaching Nation or Corp's own currency. Or they find their reserves getting low so they approach an issuer to see about stocking up a little.
So volume tends to be sporadic. But also the Open Transactions system supports scales in powers of ten, so typically there will be at least three scales of market available for those who do choose to use the market system instead of directly approaching someone to do an over the counter exchange. So large volume would probably usually happen on large scale markets; if you want to trade job-lots of 100,000 of an asset at a time, in whole lots of 100,000, you would use the 100,000-scale market. Arbitragers would presumably buy at one scale to get "wholesale" type prices then break up the lot to sell on smaller scale markets. This tendency to get better prices when buying in bulk also provides incentive to do sporadic huge transactions rather than constantly running to and from the markets.
Nations and Corps used to run scripts that, knowing from a price conversion table how much each thing was "worth" relative to each other thing, would place orders to buy and sell on three different scales of market at three different premiums, so that the markets for any given asset would always have offers on at least three scales with less premium the larger the scale.
Because the potential traders were all basically huge whales, no trades tended to happen until a large enough overstock or understock of a particular currency accumulated to make it necessary or desirable to do an exchange.
That approach did have some troubling characteristics though. For example as one of the developers who originally created DeVCoin I had kind of hoped that having massive amounts of DeVCoin-based economy in the game would help make DeVCoins valuable, but this tendency of the Nations and Corps and players in general to simply consult price charts rather than actually move coins through markets has led to DeVCoin sitting with low volume and low price on the exchanges even while millions or billions of DeVCoin-denominated economy is going on in the game.
What has been happening is someone whose debts are nominally denominated in DeVCoin will show up at, say, a General Mining Corp depot with fifty million units of Deuterium worth, according to the prices shown at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html , many many millions of DeVCoins. General Mining Corp would, of course, normally pay in their own currency, known as GMC, but by consulting tables they can look up how much of various other currencies is supposedly equivalent today and pay out in whichever currency they and the party delivering the Deuterium find mutually convenient.
DeVCoins, of course, are seldom convenient because their market cap is so low that it would be hard to keep on hand enough to pay for even one such shipment, but since the miner's debts are denominated in DeVCoin General Mining Corp can, for a small consideration, take care of sending the creditor the requisite number of DeVCoins worth of something that is mutually convenient to General Mining Corp and the creditor, so DeVCoin-denominated credit is applied against the Deuterium-deliverer's DeVCoin-denominated debt with no actual DeVCoins moving at all.
This all works out to a huge amount of "volume" without "the usual web-based crypto-exchanges the crypto crowd is used to" seeing any of it.
It is a circular problem too because where are the makers of the currency-conversion charts going to go to figure out how much DeVCoin is worth? If all DeVCoins had been issued ab initio by one Nation or Corp as its own National or Corporate currency one could simply add up the Nation or Corp's worth or treasury or reserves, its "full faith and confidence" or its on file somewhere collateral or whatever it is relied upon to use to "back" its currency, divide by the number of coins, and presto, you know what each coin is supposedly "worth". But DeVCoin, and most crypto coins such as bitcoin itself even, are not like that. You never know whether anyone at all is going to back them nor who it is that is going to. So you look at the exchanges. Where DeVCoin price remains untouched by all this massive DeVCoin-denominated activity.
So, I guess, yet another case of volume not being anti-liquidity!
-MarkM-
