Steam trade protection and skin deposits: the 7-day window

Every CS2 item you receive in a Steam trade arrives at once, but for the next seven days it can't be passed on and the trade can still be undone. That rule, Steam's trade protection, is why a skin deposit becomes a balance a week after the trade rather than the moment it completes.

What trade protection is

Valve added trade protection to Counter-Strike 2 on 16 July 2025, in the update that opened Premier Season Three. The announcement was short: if you lose control of your account or fall for a scam, "you may reverse all Counter-Strike item trades from the last 7 days."

Steam's support article spells out the mechanics. When a trade is confirmed, the items are delivered straight away and you can equip and play with them. For the next 7 days they are Trade Protected: they can't be consumed, modified or transferred, and that includes moving them into a Storage Unit. Protected items carry a yellow shield in your inventory and in the trade window. When the 7 days are up, the protection lapses and the trade can no longer be reversed.

A few details matter in practice:

• CS2 is, for now, the only game with protected items. Valve says it plans to offer the feature to other games.
• Protected and unprotected items can't be mixed in one trade, so CS2 items can't be swapped for items from games without trade protection.
• Trade protection sits on top of an older rule. Since 2 October 2024, CS2 items acquired from the in-game store, from trade offers or from the Steam Community Market have carried a 7-day restriction on trading or listing them again.

What a reversal does

You start a reversal from your Trade History page, and it isn't selective. Choosing to reverse undoes every trade containing protected items from the last 7 days, and the items go back to their previous owners.

The account that starts the reversal is then barred from trading and from the Community Market for 30 days. Its Market listings come back to its inventory, its pending trade offers are cancelled, and Steam Support says it can't lift the cooldown. The other side of each trade gets no penalty. Trades made before the feature existed can't be reversed.

Steam presents reversal as a recovery tool for hijacked accounts, and its FAQ asks you to make sure you control your account before using it. The FAQ doesn't mention any need to give a reason. So anyone who receives CS2 items in a trade has to treat the first week as provisional.

Trade holds and Steam Guard: the older layer

Before trade protection, Steam's answer to account theft was to delay items rather than recall them. In December 2015 Valve introduced trade holds: if the account giving up items hadn't had the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator for at least 7 days, Steam held the items for up to 3 days before delivery, or 1 day between friends of at least a year. Valve said at the time that it was seeing "around 77,000 accounts hijacked and pillaged each month."

On 9 March 2016 the hold grew to 15 days and was extended to Community Market listings. From the same date Steam Support stopped restoring items lost in completed trades, because restoring them meant creating duplicates.

Steam's trade hold article still describes that 15-day hold for accounts that haven't had a mobile authenticator for the past 7 days, and cancelling a held trade still brings a 7-day trading cooldown. CS2 items are now the exception. When trade protection launched, Steam's FAQ said CS2 items confirmed without the mobile app would still be held for 15 days. The version updated in May 2026 says CS2 items "are not subject to trade holds or trade escrow" and move between accounts immediately, whatever protection the account has.

Steam Guard still decides whether you can trade at all:

What this means when you deposit skins

A skin deposit is an ordinary Steam trade: your items go to an account run by the site. That makes the deposited skins trade protected in the site's inventory for 7 days, and it leaves you able to reverse the trade during that week, which would pull the skins back.

A site that turned skins into a balance at once would be open to a simple abuse: deposit, cash the balance out some other way, then reverse the trade. That is why a site that accepts skins has every reason to wait out the window. On cs2.casino, coins for skins are credited once Steam's trade hold and trade protection period ends, at 1 coin to 1 US dollar.

Some practical consequences:

1. A skin you received in a trade in the last 7 days can't be deposited anywhere yet, because protected items can't be transferred. An item bought on the Community Market or in the in-game store can't be traded until the date shown on the item.
2. Reversing a deposit doesn't undo just that trade. It undoes every protected trade on your account from the last 7 days and locks you out of trading and the Market for 30 days.
3. You still confirm the deposit trade yourself, in the Steam Mobile app if you use it. Check who you are sending to before you confirm: a thief who has taken over an account can redirect a trade to a look-alike account, as the guide to CS2 gambling scams explains.

If a week is too long, a crypto deposit is the other route, and crypto deposits and withdrawals covers networks and confirmation times. Going the other way, Trade swaps coins for skins. For how trade holds fit into the longer story of skin gambling, see the history of CS:GO gambling.

Sources

• Trade Protected Items — Steam Support
• Season Two: Episode One — Steam News
• Release Notes for 10/2/2024 — Steam News
• Steam Trade and Market Holds — Steam Support
• Trading and Market Restrictions — Steam Support
• Security and Trading (December 2015) — Steam News
• Security and Trading: Update (March 2016) — Steam News
• Trade Protected Items, July 2025 version — Wayback Machine