CSFloat Market has been growing rapidly, processing millions in sales per month – today we're announcing changes that focus on improving the selling and buying experience.

Background

Since the beginning, CSFloat Market has been operating somewhat differently to other P2P markets within CS:GO.

CSFloat had the unique ability to verify whether a given seller has traded an item to the buyer without the use of "Steam API Keys." Amidst recent updates on Steam however, we've instead had to fallback to only requesting your Steam API key when absolutely needed.

Why did we do this? We wanted to give users the option to preserve their privacy and account details – something not found on other P2P markets. CSFloat would allow you to revoke your Steam API key at any time.

However, our past approach had some drawbacks, notably:

  • We cannot verify commodity items such as stickers
  • It requires game-theory based systems to determine at-fault scenarios where a trade fails – this can have false positives
  • Sellers must cancel their Steam trade offer within the "grace period" if the buyer doesn't accept -- otherwise they are at-risk of trading away their item after the buyer was refunded
  • Malicious sellers can cause a buyer to wait longer than they should to get refunded (lack of knowledge about the pending state of trades leads to longer trade timers)
  • Uncooperative buyers require the seller to perform "manual verification" – an additional step for the seller.

As a result, we've been thinking about how we can provide the best of both worlds.

This brings us to...

Key Verification

CSFloat is introducing the ability to attach your Steam Web API key to your CSFloat Market account as a seller.

What are Steam API keys?

Steam Web API keys allow you to use various Steam APIs to interface with your account. For instance, it allows you to view your current trade offers, historical offers, and much more in a programmatic way. See xPaw's excellent documentation to see all the available methods.

Notably, Steam Web APIs provide us the ability to see trade offers you've made from your Steam account – they cannot be used to create or cancel trade offers. The key cannot be used for tasks such as logging into your Steam account, buying games, or creating chats.

Going forward there will be 2 methods to verify trades for your account:

  • Key Verification  – the new API key authentication with enhanced user experience
  • Inventory Verification – the old "inventory" based system

You will be able to optionally enable key or inventory verification – depending on whether you are comfortable with storing your Steam Web API key with CSFloat. We value your right to privacy and security.

What Benefits Does this Give?

Enabling Key Verification provides the following benefits:

  • You will now be able to list to commodities such as stickers and cases (finally)
  • You will have no risk of losing your item if you don't cancel a trade offer on time
  • Instances such as the buyer cancelling your trade offer will be automatically handled faster
  • There will be a 0% chance of you being incorrectly at-fault for a failed trade
  • Trades will be verified much faster
  • Listings no longer residing in your inventory will be delisted much faster
  • Improved inventory fetching reliability
Sellers who enable Key verification will have a special symbol on their listings indicating a smoother experience for the buyer.

How does the flow change?

When an item is purchased from you, you will have to accept or cancel the sale as before. If you don't accept within 30 minutes, the buyer can optionally cancel their purchase.

After you accept, you will have 1 hour to send the trade offer to the buyer.

Once CSFloat detects this, it will automatically notify the buyer to accept the trade offer.

As a seller, you must keep the trade offer open for at least 18 hours. Afterwards, cancelling the trade offer will automatically cancel the sale on CSFloat.

If the buyer declines the trade offer or doesn't accept in time, they will receive a penalty (2% sale price).

If the seller cancels the trade offer before 18 hours have passed, they will receive a penalty (2% sale price).

Going Forward

We highly value the security of your API keys and will never share them or use them outside of the intended purpose of your usage on CSFloat Market.

We hope that Valve will implement OAuth scopes in the future to help mitigate the need for P2P Marketplaces to request API keys.

Conclusion

We hope that these changes improve your overall experience selling and buying on CSFloat. There's more in store for 2023.

And yes, we've been listening to your requests to list stickers on CSFloat for multiple years.

Best,

Step7750 & Perplex