Topic: Market making
A market maker is (roughly) a trader who is willing to continuously publish a single price, and trade (buy or sell) at that price. More precisely, the bid/ask spread remains, but is very narrow, with the same specialist on both sides.
In order to address the "thin market problem" (buyers and sellers don't want to go where there isn't a market, and there isn't a market because buyers and sellers don't go there), allow corporations or individuals to buy the right to be the specialist in a particular good at that station. The specialist would post a function (E.g. piecewise linear) from their current inventory to their price - e.g. at 1k titan, my price per titan would be 1000 nic (+-the small bidask gap), but at 1m titan, my price per titan would drop to 0.75 nic (+- the small bidask gap). This would require a "construct a piecewise linear function" GUI, but my guess is that these devs have written that GUI before.
If the specialist's inventory (of either nic or the good that they're specializing in) goes to zero, then they drop out of the specialist role, and the market for that good goes back to normal.
This would move players out from alpha, offer an alternative to petty 0.01 wars for traders who do not want to spend large amounts of time watching their bids, and create more liquid markets for players who just want to buy or sell their stuff and get back to the field.