·event
The Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower (2023)
Image: Quendan / Imperium News · © Imperium News (fan-content reuse permitted by EVE Online fan-content policy footer) - header art by Quendan
After CCP's Viridian patch banned new XL structures in highsec, ~2,500 pilots tore down the Tranquility Trading Tower Keepstar in Perimeter on 23 June 2023, ending the Tranquility Trading Consortium's four-year run as the unofficial flagship trade hub one jump from Jita.
The Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower (2023)
For nearly five years the Tranquility Trading Tower - TTT - sat in Perimeter, the 1.0 highsec system one jump from Jita 4-4, and acted as New Eden's second-tier trade hub. Anchored in October 2018 and brought into service through 2019 as the flagship structure of the Tranquility Trading Consortium (TTC), it was the rare cross-coalition project that survived in EVE: ownership and revenue were split between The Imperium (Goonswarm), TEST Alliance, and Pandemic Horde, with sympathetic operators such as Fraternity rotating in over time. The Keepstar's market hub offered cheaper broker fees and tax than CCP's NPC stations in Jita, and by 2022 it routinely cleared meaningful slices of The Forge's market volume - particularly in fittings, capital components, and bulk industrial materials - making it the single most-used player-owned trade structure in highsec.
Two things ended that run, and they happened ten days apart.
The first was the Viridian expansion on 13 June 2023. Buried in Viridian's patch notes was the line that no further extra-large Upwell structures - Keepstars and Sotiyos - could be anchored in highsec; existing ones would keep working until they were unanchored or destroyed, but they could never be replaced. CCP framed this as restoring the design intent of the 2016 Citadels rollout, which had originally pitched XL structures as nullsec sovereignty fixtures rather than highsec trade infrastructure. For the TTC, whose entire business model was the long-term ground rent of a Keepstar in Perimeter, the rule change converted a depreciating asset into a stranded one.
The second was that the TTC's owner-coalitions read the same patch notes. On 16 June 2023 - three days after Viridian shipped - Vily announced on the TTC's Discord that the consortium was closing up shop and that final asset disbursements would happen at downtime. The Imperium publicly withdrew. With no political will to defend a building that could no longer be reanchored if it fell, the structure was effectively forfeit.
The bash was a formality. On 23 June 2023 at 03:18 UTC, ~2,500 pilots - predominantly Goonswarm and allied forces, fleet-commanded by Zintage Enaka and flying mostly Rokhs - finished the hull timer in roughly four hours with minimal opposition. Faustus Carcius, in a Ferox, landed the final blow. The killmail recorded approximately 215.79 billion ISK in destroyed value on the structure itself, and the explosion graphics famously stalled while the server processed asset-safety transfers for the assets stored in the Keepstar's hangars - a fitting send-off for a building whose entire purpose had been holding other people's stuff.
The wreckage is still visitable in Perimeter today and is catalogued on the Signal Cartel Expedition TripTiks as #039 - one jump from Jita 4-4, marking the spot where the most-used player-owned high-sec trade structure once stood.
The Keepstar's wreck remained as a Perimeter landmark for weeks afterwards. The Tranquility Trading Consortium itself did not disband: by 3 July 2023 the consortium had announced it would continue operating from smaller Perimeter Astrahuses and Fortizars as combined market and production sites, accepting reduced scale in exchange for staying in business. But the era of a single dominant player-owned highsec trade tower was over, and CCP had quietly closed the door behind it.
The TTT was the third major in-game financial fixture of the Jita ecosystem to fall to a structural-rules change rather than to enemy action - following SOMER Blink's 2014 ban for RMT and the annual Burn Jita ganking events that periodically reset the highsec freighter trade. Unlike those, the TTT's end was almost entirely administrative: a patch-note line, a Discord post, and a scheduled server-side execution.
Battle stats
Goonswarm Federation + WreckingMachine + opportunists held the field- System
- Perimeter · The Forge
- Sides
-
Goonswarm Federation
Anchor
On side: Goonswarm Federation + WreckingMachine + opportunists
Wrecking Machine.
Partner
On side: Goonswarm Federation + WreckingMachine + opportunists
Hard Knocks Citizens
Anchor
On side: Tranquility Trading Consortium (TTC) - Hard Knocks Citizens + Wormhole Society
Wormhole Society
Partner
On side: Tranquility Trading Consortium (TTC) - Hard Knocks Citizens + Wormhole Society
- ISK destroyed
- 215.8 B
- Decisive doctrine
- Stranded-asset Keepstar destruction following Viridian's "no further XL structures in highsec" rule (13 June 2023) - the TTC's Keepstar in Perimeter was rendered un-replaceable, kicking off a community frenzy to be the one to put the killing blow on the most famous highsec Keepstar in EVE history. The 23 June destruction was the conclusion of an opportunistic skirmish phase rather than a single decisive doctrine fight
What does “held the field” mean?
The badge marks the side that held the field at the end of this engagement — who was still on grid, who walked away with the objective on the day. It is not a verdict on the wider war or campaign, which often turned on logistics, attrition, or political fallout in the weeks after. The full strategic arc lives in the deep-dive above.
Caveats & contested numbers
The TTT (Tranquility Trading Tower) was the highsec trade Keepstar in Perimeter operated by the Tranquility Trading Consortium, the canonical "highsec deep-tank Keepstar" of the late 2010s and early 2020s and a key part of the post-Citadels trade-tower infrastructure. CCP's Viridian expansion on 13 June 2023 banned anchoring further XL structures in highsec, which converted the TTT into a stranded asset. Goonswarm-aligned and opportunist groups raced to kill it; the structure dropped on 23 June 2023.
The pilot, ship, and ISK figures here describe the on-the-day Keepstar kill, not the multi-cycle structure-grind across the prior week. zKillboard's killmail records 215,787,515,531 ISK total on the hull-drop (212.49 B for ship and fit, 3.30 B for related sponsorship), 2,509 pilots on the killmail, and 99.15 M damage dealt. TAGN's contemporaneous "Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower in Perimeter" (23 June 2023) corroborates the engagment scope at ~3,400-4,000 peak local and a ~3-hour shoot under TiDi. The cumulative engagement that brought the Keepstar down spanned multiple timer cycles, and community sources (TAGN, Nosy Gamer) describe the fall as a coordinated structure-grind rather than publishing combined kill statistics across the full siege. Perimeter is 0.5 in The Forge, highsec despite the supercapital-class structure that fell here.
Context at this date
vs M2-XFE's all-time peak (29.11 T)
- Killmails
- - total ships destroyed game-wide that month, from CCP's killmail feed (aggregated by EVE Ref).
- PLEX
- - Jita market price of one PLEX (30 days of game time), in ISK.
- Maps
- - quarterly sovereignty / coalition / faction-warfare snapshots from verite.space (Verite Rendition).
Gallery
Sources
- zKillboard - TTT Keepstar killmail, Perimeter, 23 Jun 2023
- Adam4EVE - TTT structure history
- CCP - Viridian Expansion Notes (13 Jun 2023)
- TAGN - New Keepstars and Sotiyos Banned from High Sec (14 Jun 2023)
- TAGN - TTC closing up shop (16 Jun 2023)
- TAGN - Fall of the Tranquility Trading Tower (23 Jun 2023)
- The Nosy Gamer - TTT and Shadow War Update
- TAGN - TTC decides to stay in business (3 Jul 2023)
- Signal Cartel - Expedition TripTik 039: Tranquility Trading Tower Landmark (Researcher Arachnis)