Hey Skyblock,
I've been thinking about a way to possibly make obsidian/lava collection easier for people that don't just want to buy from others (and also give a use to crying obsidian rather than it being purely a decor block) (since the only ways of getting more lava/obsidian than the bucket you started with is buying it from other users),
and I propose being able to use sponges to "dry" crying obsidian by right clicking a Crying Obsidian with a sponge, it'd make the sponge turn into a wet sponge (so you'd need to dry it in a furnace or something, takes time and not just spammable) and turns the Crying Obsidian into just Obsidian that you can pick up normally or with a bucket.

Now I know this is an idea, so people may instinctively focus on "How will this affect the [insert item here] market?"

A sponge costs a pretty penny in the first place (~30g), and you'd need to dry it every time making it time-consuming for anyone who wants to do it repetitively.

Crying Obsidian costs more than regular obsidian because of the scarcity, averaging around 5g but sold as cheap as 3g (more than obsidian/lava bucket)

Crying obsidian is extremely scarce (yippie i'm repeating myself) , only being able to be obtained from ruined portals which are hard to find in the nether and on average only give on average 1-2 Crying Obsidian, if you're lucky you can get more than that but sometimes it doesn't spawn with no Crying Obsidian

Although you can get Crying Obsidian as much as you want (don't change the Crying Obsidian magically so it has a 0.1% chance of spawning or you can only get 5 a day because it said so) it requires a LOT of exploring [from experience] and it'd take me hours just to travel and search enough to possibly get a stack of Crying obsidian, that may seem like a lot but there are better things I could be doing to make grass faster than farming Crying Obsidian in the nether.

Also some side notes/tl;dr the problems:solutions :
1. It doesn't replace just buying obsidian/lava from players
2. There is a way to automate it (easily) since it requires you going out and exploring, actually finding the crying obsidian, taking it back home, placing it, using a sponge on it, getting the obsidian, then having to dry the sponge if you want to do it again.
3.It's slower & more annoying than other grass-making methods, won't it won't be economy breaking.

[EDIT] SkyblockMall suggested that you could possibly just put the crying obsidian in a furnace, that'd be a great idea, unfortunately I had wanted to play it safe with the "Think about the economy!" group so i included that extra step with the sponge to let the sponge be more valuable to players and also more steps towards crying obsidian.

[EDIT 2] Tamb3 mentioned the problem with bad actors possibly taking advantage of this, here's my response:
Even if some players use esp to spot crying obsidian faster, it doesn't really ruin anything as it's a rare block from ruined portals that is usually in the open (granted there can be a rare occurrence of a ruined portal completely encased in netherrack, which can happen time to time which could give people with ESP the upper hand slightly, possibly making an extra CO here and there, but some if not most of them should be completely revealed or partially revealed even if it's only the bottom showing since that's the only structure [that i know of] that can spawn with magma blocks anywhere and other special blocks that usually only appear on it that you could spot from quite a bit away) but it still takes a LONG while to collect a meaningful amount even if you were using ESP or some other thing, but with the time consuming way of turning CO into Obsidian or the need to explore a LOT, nobody can suddenly get a great great amount of obsidian or lava to dilute the market.

Also besides, moderators (i assume) watch for weird mining patterns and stuff so if the portal is completely buried with no trace/pathway of normally finding it they can probably guess it's someone using ESP

Thank you for your time.