Valve's 2018 trade cooldown: the 7-day lock, trading bots and ExpressTrade

On 29 March 2018 Valve ruled that any CS:GO item received in a trade had to wait seven days before it could be traded again. The rule was aimed at the automated Steam accounts that skin trading and gambling sites ran on, and when a popular skin marketplace launched a way around it that June, Valve locked the marketplace's bot accounts 15 days later. This is what changed, how traders and sites reacted, and where the seven-day window stands in CS2.

Why the sites needed instant trades

Valve built Steam trading so customers could swap items with each other, and in 2018 it said thousands did so every day. Large trading and gambling sites used it another way: they ran their business on their own websites but sometimes completed deals through bot accounts on Steam, in breach of Steam's terms. A deposit went into a bot, and a withdrawal or a win came out of one.

Valve's 2016 crackdown sent those sites notices to stop operating through Steam; the 2018 change went after the trading pattern itself. The history of CS:GO gambling shows where it sits among Valve's other moves.

Valve's post drew a line between the two uses. Third parties had built services "that use automated Steam accounts to mimic players", some of which had "become a vector for fraud or scams". Those services "rely on the ability to trade each item very frequently", while an item moved between real players "no more than once a week in the vast majority of cases". A seven-day wait would rarely get in a player's way, but a bot could no longer pass the same item straight on.

The update of 29 March 2018

The change came in an update that also adjusted Nuke, Dust II and Canals. From that day, CS:GO items received in trade had "the same seven-day trade cooldown as items purchased in-game or via the Steam Community Market"; until then, an item could be traded on as soon as it arrived. Valve admitted the change "may also be disruptive to some players" and said it would keep evaluating its trading policies.

OPSkins, which Kotaku described as one of the biggest CS:GO skin sites, wrote that a deposited item "will not appear on the site until the seven-day trade hold has been lifted from our bots", though it would already be in the bot's inventory. Each skin a site took in now sat in a bot for seven days before it could leave again, as a withdrawal or a prize.

OPSkins and several news sites called the cooldown a hold, but a Steam trade hold delays delivery itself and depends on how well an account is protected; the cooldown applied after delivery, to every traded CS:GO item.

The backlash

Kotaku reported the next day that traders were declaring CS:GO finished, that some were selling off their collections, and that some players saw a scheme to steer people away from third-party sites and back to the Steam Community Market. A petition asking Valve to reverse the rule already had nearly 65,000 signatures.

Valve did not move. In May 2018 John McDonald, a Valve developer who regularly answered players on Twitter, replied to one that "there has been a 70% decrease in the number of scamming tickets filed". Valve had seen the petition, he added, but a reversal was "exceedingly unlikely". Dexerto, which reported the tweet, noted the obvious objection: with far less trading going on, fewer scam reports would follow anyway.

ExpressTrade: a way around the clock

On 6 June 2018 OPSkins launched ExpressTrade, a free service for instant trades that, in PCGamesN's words, allowed traders "to circumvent the seven-day hold". Skins deposited with OPSkins sat in its bot accounts on Steam, and any trade on Steam would have restarted the clock, so an instant swap could only have changed who owned a skin in OPSkins' own records while the item stayed in the same bot.

Valve said ExpressTrade "uses Valve intellectual property and violates our Steam Subscriber Agreement, and is already being used by other businesses to avoid Valve policies". PCGamesN read the last part as most likely a reference to skin gambling sites, one of the reasons for the cooldown in the first place.

The deadline and the lockout

Valve's statement went up on 8 June, two days after the launch. It said Valve had enforced its Steam Subscriber Agreement terms for two years, linking to its July 2016 statement, and that the March cooldown was meant "to fight fraud and misuse of Steam Accounts". Below it was the message Valve had sent OPSkins, shown as a Twitter conversation and signed by a Valve lawyer.

The message told OPSkins to stop using Valve's intellectual property, from trademarks to gun models and images from CS:GO, in ExpressTrade and its promotions at once and everywhere else by 21 June. It said OPSkins was using Steam accounts for commercial purposes, against the Steam Subscriber Agreement, and that Valve would disable its trading accounts by that date. It ended: "You should resolve any obligations to OPSkins users prior to that."

OPSkins told customers to withdraw their Steam items before 21 June, and said it wasn't shutting down, that their funds were safe and that it would keep offering trading for other games.

Valve shut the bots down on 21 June. A Reddit user who tallied the locked accounts counted 2,843 bots holding CS:GO items, with more than 1.5 million items between them, worth nearly $2 million by that user's estimate at June 2018 prices; PCGamesN, which reported the tally, described the items as lost. OPSkins closed in January 2020, after emailing users to withdraw their funds before 24 January.

Where the seven-day rule stands in CS2

The seven-day window survives in CS2 in a different form. Items received in a trade now arrive at once, with no trade hold whatever the account's security, but for seven days they are Trade Protected: they can't be consumed, modified or transferred, and the trade can be reversed from the Trade History page. Steam trade protection and skin deposits covers the details and the October 2024 rule that came before it.

Valve's 2018 posts explained the cooldown in terms of fraud, scams and misuse of Steam accounts. In March 2026, answering New York's lawsuit, it was blunter: it had "shipped features (like trade reversal and trade cooldown) to discourage gambling sites' ability to operate and protect Steam users from fraud", and had locked more than a million Steam accounts misused by third parties for gambling, fraud and theft.

The window also sets the timing of skin deposits. A site that credited a skin the moment it arrived could lose it to a reversal after paying out its value, so sites that take skins have reason to wait out the seven days. On cs2.casino, coins for skins are credited once Steam's trade hold and trade protection period ends. Every game there shows its house edge, the share of each bet the house keeps on average, and its bet limits; over time the house wins.

One part of Valve's policy applies to every player: it says it works to shut down Steam accounts found using its game items on gambling sites, which it treats as a breach of the Steam Subscriber Agreement.

Sources

• Adjustments to maps and trade — Counter-Strike blog
• ExpressTrade — Counter-Strike blog
• CSGO Skin Traders Dumping Their Inventories After Valve Announces New Rules — Kotaku
• Valve's John McDonald Comments On New Skin Trading Restrictions and Possibility of Reverting the Decision — Dexerto
• Valve shuts down CS:GO trading bots, removing almost $2M in inventory — PCGamesN
• OPSkins Shutting down: withdraw your balance or funds before this date — DigiStatement
• Trade Protected Items — Steam Support
• About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve — Steam Support