A Look At The Active ISK Delta In February 2025

On Friday CCP Games released the February Monthly Economic Report (MER) for EVE Online. As this post will look at a major influence on the New Eden money supply I want to take a quick look at the developers' main takeaways from last month's MER.

Economic Summary

• Production Value has seen a significant increase (11.2%) in February.
• Mining Value has been steady during the February Period, after 3 months of strong growth.
• Bounties has seen a 16% increase over February, while the commodity ISK faucet has been steady.
• The MPI has been steady!

As noted on Friday, February only has 28 days compared to January's 31 days. One would think, all things being equal, all the numbers should have declined. Unless, of course, the summary above is based on daily and not monthly numbers.

Month over month comparisons of explosions by security band

The month-over-month rise in bounties combined with a 7.9% decrease in NPC kills (7.1% in null sec) indicates bounties received a pretty big buff. No wonder players were moving from mining to ratting in null sec.

But while bounties increased, the Active ISK Delta recorded a historic figure, at least in terms of raw ISK. The 80.4 trillion ISK removed from the EVE economy due to the net departure and returning to the game of players was the 4th most since January 2017.

All months with Active ISK Delta value less than -75 trillion ISK

But as I mentioned last month I need to look at the Active ISK Delta differently as the money supply has more than doubled over the last 8 years. So when I look at the percentage of the money supply due to players leaving and returning to the game, I see a different picture.

All months where Active ISK Delta was 5% or more of money supply

The 3.3% of the game's ISK exiting the money supply last month placed February 2025 in 27th place out of the 98 months I have records for the Active ISK Delta since January 2017.

Using the percentage of the money supply removed produces a bit of a different analysis. For example, year-over-year the Active ISK Delta changed from 75.3 trillion ISK removed from the economy in February 2024 to 80.4 trillion ISK removed in February 2025.

Looking at the Active ISK Delta with seasonal effects and inflation minimized

Using percentage of the money supply as the metric, the Active ISK Delta actually improved YoY, from -3.6% in February 2024 to -3.3% last month. Don't get me wrong, ideally for those wishing for more people to play with, the higher over the average line shown in the above graphic, the better. While the trend is not spiraling into a failure cascade and the heat death of the EVE universe, the devs do have reason to try to make changes like the upcoming "Revenant Major Update" due to release on Wednesday.

I haven't completed all my conversions to the percentage of the money supply yet, but hope to have all my charts updated in time for the March MER. I realize I'm only looking at 8 years of data out of EVE Online's 22 years of existence. But even during that time the money supply has grown approximately 140% and I need to try to account for the effects of that monetary growth if I wish to make comparisons stretching back more than 2 or 3 years. 

Also hopefully readers won't mind too much if I use this post to address issues other than the Active ISK Delta. The AID is just part of the overall money supply and the summary in the February MER did point to news affecting the growth of ISK in the game. And unless I come up with additional posts about the MER, posts about the Active ISK Delta are just the most relevant form I have to discuss the MER.