Three different stories are emerging right now in the Second Life financial markets. Ronisu Rotaru proposal for restructuring SLC has passed. In addition, the VSTEX index has broken 1000, and Second Life Investors Bank has a new set of problems. Each of these require a little exploration.

A couple of weeks ago, Spontaneous Rich entertained the option of buying out SLC as part of a plan to bring his company public. Talks broke down over the unresolved issue of how stock owned by people no longer in Second Life should be handled. Ronisu Rotaru came forward with a proposal tie SLC together with CIE. SLC would remain a separate company but would have a close tie to CEI. Shareholders were invited to send No Mod, Copy, and Transferable Notecards to Ronisu. The results were announced and of over 800,000 shares voting, only around 4,000 shares voted against the proposal.

Some investors have questioned whether all the votes against the proposal were counted, saying that they knew of large investors who were voting against the proposal. Since there is no way of verifying whether all the votes were counted, or if some no votes got misplaced, the results are somewhat dubious.

Samantha Goldflake, Communication and Public Relations Director of VSTEX, notes that they are in the process of installing a new voting system. This would get around the issues of having an interested party gathering the votes but would still raise issues of how the votes are verified.

The VSTEX Index’ breaking the 1,000 mark is due to one big move. Earlier today, 189 shares Bart Heart Estates (BHE) traded at 500. A week ago, it was trading under L$ 30/share. This is a very lightly traded stock which no one seems to sell. So it seems as if almost half of the value of the VSTEX index is based on a single low volume stock.

It is hard to tell what is going on with Second Life Investors Bank. They were the first to report the hacking incident which shut down LNL for close to a week. They emerged at that point, unscathed. Yet now Linden Lab has shut down Tyrian Camilo’s account because “had received fraudulent funds”. There has to be more to the story than he or Linden Lab is revealing at this point. Receiving fraudulent funds, in and of itself, should not be sufficient grounds to shutdown someone’s account. If it was, and I were a serious griefer, I’d find some way of getting some fraudulent funds and then be sure to give it to all my enemies. Since the initial report, Tyrian states that his account has been reactivated, but an additional L$ 108,834 has been taken from his account.

It is interesting to see that despite the wide distrust of many Second Life banks, a lot of the comments are about how people distrust Linden Lab even more. This is truly unfortunate. To me, one of the most compelling aspects of Second Life is a vibrant microeconomy. Linden Lab needs to be very careful to protect the value of currency in Second Life. They need to aggressively root out fraud. But, they need to do it in a way that regular players feel that their funds in Second Life are safer, not less safe, than they would be if Linden Lab did nothing. I’m not sure that is the case right now.

So, the markets continue, as does the distrust. Let’s see what happens next.