Just had a though, due to the game's steady self inflation as you rank up (IE - Your income and expenditure increasing in proportion), and the steady full stop inflation - Yes, I'm board enough to monitor the forum trading post and their has been inflation of 10% in the time that I've been playing (6 months), so the two problems are:

High ranchers ripping of the low rankers - At low rank 2,000 credits is alot (Ranks 1-20), but at rank 100, for example 20,000,000 is a modest sum, so what is their to stop the high rankers paying new players a few hundred credits for artifacts that normally cost alot more.

Vice Versa: If the high rankers payed the low rankers an honest fee, then the low rankers would be impossibly rich for the first 50-100 ranks. 2,000,000 goes a long way when you're below rank 60. I know from experience. This would mess with the fiscal balance of the game (Yes.. I did an economics course one)

this can be solved pretty easily, either a rank limit ( formula must be pretty good for that)
or a max amount of artis you can buy each day/week
and similar ideas

with the base system now, a low ranker can have technology they can't afford really fast. It's unlikely, except in case of gifts, for the low ranked player to rly have an amount that is impossible to use up will probably no longer occur if the low rankers are in research legions.

And an auction style trading of any kind can resolve most problems of "rip off" as it would be rather hard to.

its not going to unbalance anything.. there are numerous traders who have frozen rank and JUST TRADE, they've got more wealth then probably 75% of the high ranks (1K+) but they enjoy the trading aspect more then anything else, and they are also growing steadily stronger because of not ranking.

I think that another issue that might occur early on is that the higher ranked players might dominate the market and prevent most of the low ranked players from being able to bid on pretty much anything, but since most high ranked players get a fair amount of their own arties from hourly shipments that problem will likely fix itself or it may not even come about to begin with. I do however like failnames idea of putting a max limit to the amount of arties a person can get from the trade center in a certain period of time.

lets just wait for it too come out before we start criticizing it.

great idea