On July 16, 2025, Valve announced an update regarding item trading in the game CS2 – from now on, every user can cancel a completed trade within 7 days of the exchange. This is a significant change for websites that deal with buying and selling skins, including ours. The main goal of the SellYourSkins platform has always been to offer instant cash payouts, but at this point, that has become very difficult. A user can now cancel a trade for up to a week, which creates more opportunities for scams and abuse.
How are we responding to this?
The SellYourSkins platform is still 100% functional and safe: users can sell their items in the same way as before. However, due to the update mentioned earlier, cash payouts will now only be possible 7 days after the trade with our bot is completed. What else should you know?
- Payouts will still be processed fully automatically, directly to users’ accounts and to the payment details they provided.
- There are no extra fees or requirements for our users due to these changes.
- We will keep you informed about any further updates on our homepage and blog. Our support team is also available to help.
At the moment, this update only applies to CS2, but there is a high chance it will be extended to other Valve games as well. These changes are meant to protect players from scams and give them more control, but they also introduce limits and new conditions that we all have to adjust to.
How does the new “Trade Protected” lock work?
An item marked as “Trade Protected” (recognizable by the yellow shield icon next to it) is covered by a protection system that allows the user to cancel the trade within 7 days after it was completed. This means that if a player realizes after the exchange that they were scammed, tricked, or simply changed their mind, they have the option to restore the state before the trade.
To cancel a trade, the user must submit a request for a “trade reversal” through Steam’s support system. If the item has protection enabled and less than 7 days have passed since the trade, the user can directly recover the items they gave away. At the same time, Steam automatically removes the items received by the other party and returns them to the original owner. It’s basically a kind of “reset” that undoes the entire transaction.
The most important consequence of reversing a trade is that all items involved – both given and received – are automatically placed under a 30-day trade cooldown. This means that after the items are returned, they cannot be traded or sold on the market for a full month. This cooldown cannot be removed or shortened. This system was introduced to discourage users from abusing the trade reversal option and to reduce false reports.
How does Valve’s update affect the CS2 skin market?
Valve’s update means the end of fast skin trading, which used to be the foundation of many transactions and trading strategies. One of the most noticeable effects of this change is that it blocks the possibility of combining items from CS2 with items from other games like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, or Rust. This was a common practice before – especially because TF2 keys acted like a form of “currency”. They had stable value, were easy to trade, and didn’t have any time restrictions, making them the perfect middleman in trading deals. Now, that option is gone. The CS2 market is completely cut off from trading with other games, which used to make many transactions smoother and easier.
As if that weren’t enough: the new protection affects not only trading, but also how you use items in the game. Items marked with Trade Protection cannot be traded or modified for 7 days. In practice, this means you can’t open any cases that were received via trade until the full week has passed. You also can’t use stickers – you can’t apply them, and you can’t scrape them off skins. Valve went even further and blocked the option to move such protected items into storage units (special containers for item storage).
This update hits fast trading, bulk transactions, and the external market very hard. Traders who relied on instant liquidity and exchanges between games now have to wait and plan ahead. These restrictions are meant to improve user safety and reduce the number of scams, but in the short term, they disrupt the systems that previously fueled the CS2 skin market. And they may even affect skin values in the long run.
