So currently most of the gold comes from main quests. Town board and Faction quests don’t really add serious currency into the game.
Companies face serious upkeep & upgrading buildings is massively expensive.
Currently Items come into the game like candy. This is reflected in the seriously low item prices.
So my idea was:
Allow companies & players to pay upkeep/taxes with items.
For Companies: town upkeep & crafting station upgrades.
For Players: House rent.
So instead of a company paying 20k in upkeep they could also pay with X amount of items of a certain minimum gear score / rarity.
Combine that with reducing the amount of gear you get from exploration / mob drops and you got yourself a decent item sink, while giving companies room to use their gold to actually contribute to the economy instead of throwing it down the drain.
This is just a basic idea, if anyone has a better idea, or an extension to this idea let me know!