Deposit a skin

Depositing sends your CS2 items to a custody account through one ordinary Steam trade offer. When Steam's hold on that trade clears, a token mints to your linked wallet.

Before you start, make sure all three prerequisites from Getting started are in place — a Steam account that can trade with a Public inventory, a linked wallet on chain 4663, and a saved trade URL. The deposit request is refused outright without a linked wallet or a saved trade URL.

The flow

   YOU                          LOOTFI                       STEAM
    │                             │                            │
    │  select items, confirm      │                            │
    ├────────────────────────────►│                            │
    │                             │  send ONE trade offer      │
    │                             ├───────────────────────────►│
    │                             │                            │
    │        offer appears in your Steam trade offers          │
    │◄─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
    │                                                          │
    │  YOU accept it in Steam (with your mobile authenticator) │
    ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────►│
    │                             │                            │
    │                             │◄─── trade recorded ────────┤
    │                             │                            │
    │            deposit appears, hold begins                  │
    │◄────────────────────────────┤                            │

1 · Select your items

Open your inventory in LootFi. It shows the CS2 items Steam reports as tradable. Anything untradable, or from another game, is not offered — see What you can deposit.

Select one item or several. Selecting several produces one trade offer covering all of them, not one offer per item.

One offer per batch, and a batch shares a clock

Every item you select goes into a single Steam trade offer and a single deposit batch. Because they arrive on one trade, they share one receipt time — so they finish their hold together and mint together.

The trade-off: a batch moves at the speed of its slowest item, and its displayed status is the least-advanced state of anything in it. If you want items to clear independently, deposit them separately.

2 · Confirm, and wait for the offer

When you confirm, a custody account sends the trade offer. This normally takes a few seconds.

The offer comes FROM us and REQUESTS your items

A legitimate LootFi deposit offer:

• arrives from a custody account, addressed to you;
• requests the exact items you selected and offers nothing in return;
• asks you for nothing outside Steam's own trade UI.

You are never asked to send items first, never asked to send an item to a "verification" account, and never asked to trade anything extra. If an offer does not match what you just selected, item for item, decline it.

Verify the item list in the offer against your selection before accepting. Accepting a trade offer is irreversible from your side.

3 · Accept it in Steam

Open the offer in Steam — in the client, on the website, or on the mobile app — check the items, and accept. You will need to confirm through your Steam Mobile Authenticator.

Nothing on LootFi can accept the offer for you. We do not have your password or your authenticator, and cannot move items out of your inventory. See Getting started.

If you decline the offer, or let it expire, the deposit simply ends. Nothing is lost and you can start again.

4 · The hold begins

Once you accept, the items leave your inventory and Steam's hold starts. This is where the real wait is.

Roughly seven days, and it is Steam's clock

Steam applies trade protection to the completed trade — about 7 days — and adds an escrow hold on top if your account triggers one. The wait is the longest applicable hold, not the sum.

During most of that window the item is in neither your inventory nor the custody account's. That is Steam's normal behaviour for a protected trade and it is not a sign that anything is wrong.

Track your deposit explains every status you will see.

You do not need to keep the page open, stay signed in, or do anything at all during the hold. When it clears, the deposit is re-verified and the token mints to your linked wallet automatically. The mint costs you nothing.

5 · Do not reverse the trade

Reversing a deposit trade is the one action that genuinely hurts

Steam's trade protection lets you request a reversal of a recent trade. Do not use it on a deposit you made deliberately.

• It does not produce a faster or cleaner refund.
• A reversal signal freezes every open deposit on your Steam account, not just the one you reversed, and each has to be re-verified before anything is allowed to mint.
• If a reversal succeeds after the item has been credited, the result is a token backed by an item that is no longer in custody.

If you have deposited something by mistake, wait for it to mint and then withdraw it normally. That path exists, is supported, and returns the same physical item.

See Trade reversals for what the protocol does when it sees one.

Your inventory after depositing

Deposited items disappear from your Steam inventory immediately — they are on the trade.

In LootFi, inventory data is cached for a few minutes to avoid hammering Steam, and the cached copy is dropped and refreshed as soon as you deposit, so you should not see deposited items still listed as available. Elsewhere, a skin you have just acquired may take a few minutes to appear.

If your inventory looks wrong for longer than that, it is usually the privacy setting rather than the cache — see Troubleshooting.

When a deposit is refused

Deposits fail fast and with a reason rather than half-completing:

What you see	What it means
link a wallet first	No wallet is linked to your account. See Getting started.
save your Steam trade URL first	No trade URL on file, so no offer can be sent.
item … is not depositable	The item is untradable, or is not a CS2 item. See What you can deposit.
items not found in inventory	The item moved, was traded, or the cached view was stale. Reload and try again.
A message about Steam rate-limiting	Steam is throttling automated requests. Wait — retrying makes it last longer. See Limits & timing.
A message that trading is temporarily unavailable	Deposits are paused. Nothing has been sent and nothing is lost; try again later.

Nothing above sends an offer, so there is never an orphaned offer to clean up after one of these.

Next

• Track your deposit — the highest-value page while you wait.
• Trade protection — why the wait is what it is.
• Deposit lifecycle — the state machine in detail.