ROBLOX already features a robust trading system where Builders Club members can exchange goods and barter for limited items and weapons, but actual Robux have never fit into the equation. Starting today, we’re enhancing the system by allowing you to add Robux to trades. This new feature will allow users to make more equitable trades, while simultaneously setting the ground work for some upcoming innovations. 

Our currency exchange system allows you to trade money for money (i.e. Robux for tickets and vice-versa) and items for items. This creates a predicament for traders: they want to make a trade, but the user they’re trading with doesn’t quite have the item (or items) to make a mutually beneficial exchange. This sends the user who falls short straight to the catalog to find another item that’s worth the difference, however small or large that may be.

Allowing users to pay the difference upfront with Robux makes sense to us, and we hope it does for users too. Why send a potential trader off looking for an item to make up the difference when you can settle your deal with the addition of a few Robux? In order to make it easier to create equatable trades, we’ve got to change the way currency moves in ROBLOX.

Adding Robux to a trade will work like user-to-user sales work on ROBLOX today–there will be a 30% marketplace fee applied to the Robux involved in the trade . Here’s an example: if you’re trading hats, and add 100 Robux as incentive to make the trade, 30 Robux will be taken from you, the seller.

The Future

These changes also lay the foundation for some exciting plans we have for the future. Without getting too technical, we altered some very basic parts of our infrastructure in order to reflect our new outlook on currency that focuses on making it more robust and extensible.

We’ve taken a lot of minor parts of our currency interface and given them slight updates–we moved all of our currency operations out of the direct web code into an abstracted web service that will eventually handle all of ROBLOX’s currency transactions. This changes the concept of our escrow system entirely–though not really on the users end–and will eventually culminate in users having the ability to sell items directly from their games. We decided to change the way our escrows work for security purposes–the hard part isn’t simply allowing users to sell items in-game, it’s making sure they can do so securely.  We’re tentatively planning this feature to go live early next year.

Giving users the ability to trade Robux for items will lead to some very interesting activity in the ROBLOX economy, and we’re looking forward to seeing how this alters day-to-day trading. We’re equally excited about the infrastructure changes that came bundled in with the feature, and what those changes hold for the future.