Trade Protected Items in CS2 explained

Valve rolled out one of the biggest trading updates ever for CS2. Skin selling and trading is a major part of the CS2 community, and with the market recently crossing $5 billion in value, it’s clear how important it is. However, the more this market has grown, the higher the occurrences of scams and account theft complaints have been shared by the players.

For years, players have been losing valuable skins due to trade scams, and the developers finally seem to be doing something about it.

The Premier Season 3 is live now, and Valve has introduced a new Trade Protected Items system that will help to fight the skin trade scams. On that note, here's everything you need to know about it.

Everything we know about Trade Protected Items in CS2

Trade Protection is a new system that allows players to reverse trades if their Steam account was compromised. After a trade is completed, the items are delivered right away, and you can use them in-game instantly. However, for the next seven days, those items will have a "Trade Protected" status.

During this seven-day protection period, these items can’t be modified or transferred to anyone else. However, once the days pass, the Trade Protected tag disappears.

This new feature is really helpful in situations where a player might have lost access to their skins or the whole Steam account because of malware or a scam. If that happens, now the player has a window of seven days to recover their items by reversing trades.

You don’t need to contact Steam Support to do the reversal. Simply go to your Trade History page, and you’ll see a list of trades with Trade Protected items.

As of this writing, this feature is only available for Counter-Strike 2 items, as it's the biggest in-game cosmetics market with possibly the most number of trade scams. However, Valve may expand it to other games in the future. Note that you can’t mix protected Counter-Strike items with items from other games in a single trade.

That's everything you need to know about the Trade Protected Items in the game. Unfortunately, Valve can't reverse trades that were made before this update.

Read more articles here:

• Team Vitality are your CS2 Austin Major 2025 champions
• ESL announces first-ever CS2 IEM Krakow for 2026
• "We pushed it far beyond what we thought was possible" - f0rest on Ninjas in Pyjamas' legendary streak in Counter-Strike

Are you stuck on today's Wordle? Our Wordle Solver will help you find the answer.

Edited by Ritoban "Veloxi" Paul