Before the Crius release due to certain modules (eg. 425mm Railgun I) having better compression rates compared to actual compressed ores, the compressed ore market was mostly ruled by the occasional margin trading scam.Also not aiding in compressed ores popularity is the Rorquals limitation to only be situated in Low, Null and Wormhole Space.
With the Crius release and its changes to reprocessing, ore compression and the introduction of the compression array, things have changed in favor of compressed ore.
So far most production has taken place in highsec, with the exception of capitals, super capitals and titans, where the latter heavily rely on the import of low end minerals.
In order to build an Avatar roughly 35 million cubic metres of Tritanium is required (ME 10 for all capital parts, ME 2 for the Avatar) and everyone who is involved in logistics knows that moving such an amount is a horrible and tedious task.
At this point compressed ores come into play. For instance compressed veldspar only has 3.6% the volume of the refined tritanium it holds.
As low and nullsec exclusive ores do not hold large quantities of Tritanium, Pyerite and Mexallon their market volume stayed small, however the four ores shown in the table above are all available in Caldari Highsec space and their compressed variants gained relevance over the past three weeks.
Veldspar and Scordite are in especially high demand, due to the large quantity of Tritanium and Pyerite they hold, however all of the compressed variants have seen increased volume on the market with more now being stocked. With Fridays being the most active days, the compressed variants peaked at over 11 million units last Friday (08.08.2014) with a combined value of roughly 41 billion ISK.
How the compressed ore market evolves remains to be seen, but the current volume being traded is still rather small compared to their mineral counterparts, but are expected to rise continuously, especially with compression no longer being a time consuming activity.
Even though compressed ores are making hauling large quantities of ore easier, this does not make it safer the Miasmos is still easy prey for anyone interested in your valuable cargo.
*The diagram was created using ingame market data and its raw data is available here.
-AkaAlias
