Small to start with. Keep it simple, materials.

One of the most tedious things in the game for me is collecting Spinmetal, Helium Filaments, Relic Iron and Spirit Bloom.

So how about we can just trade these until a descent non-abusable system is put in place.

And how to prevent this being abused? Simple, you can only trade and receive exactly what you need.

First you can only mark one item to receive a trade material for with a click of a thumbstick or something (option to select Ascendant materials if this idea works!).

Then you do the same with only one type of Materials you can part with.

So you walk up to another player in the Tower, Inspect them. Here you will see what they need to upgrade their selected armour, but you can only exchange the same amount. So if I wanted 16 Helium Filaments for my Arm, but he only needed 12 Relic Iron for his Helmet, we can only trade 12 despite me having more Iron than that.

I think this would be a good way to help stop abusing the system as you are limited to what you need rather than what you want.

This could be used with Ascendant material also, but as these items are so rare, Im not going to say go for it until I read all the replies to this thread telling me how flawed my idea is :)