Track your deposit

Your deposit shows a status while it works its way toward a token. This page says exactly what each one means in Steam's terms, and — more importantly — which ones require action from you.

The short answer for almost everyone: it is waiting on Steam, there is nothing to do, and the item being in neither inventory is normal.

The ladder

   Offer Sent
       │   you accept the trade offer in Steam
       ▼
   Received (Locked)
       │   Steam has the trade; it has not yet issued the item's
       │   post-trade identity. Normal. Can last the whole window.
       ▼
   Trade Protection  ──or──  Escrow Hold
       │   the countdown you can actually see
       ▼
   Ready to Mint
       │   hold cleared, re-verified, mint transaction in flight
       ▼
   Minted ✓
       token is in your wallet

   Off-ladder, and rare:   Reversed   ·   Failed

What each status means

Offer Sent

A custody account has sent you a Steam trade offer requesting your items. Nothing has moved yet.

Action required: yes. Open Steam, check that the offer requests exactly the items you selected, and accept it. You will need your mobile authenticator.

If you never see the offer, check your Steam trade offers directly rather than waiting — and confirm your trade URL is current, since regenerating it in Steam invalidates the saved one. See Troubleshooting.

If you decline or ignore it, the deposit ends. Nothing is lost.

Received (Locked)

You accepted. The trade is recorded and the items are in Steam's hands.

This status specifically means Steam has not yet issued the item's post-trade identity. Steam withholds that until the protection window ends, so a healthy deposit can sit here for the entire ~7 days.

Action required: none. This is not a stalled deposit.

The item is in NEITHER inventory right now. That is correct.

This is the single most alarming and most normal thing about depositing.

During Steam's trade-protection window, a traded item has left the sender's inventory and has not yet settled into the receiver's. Look in your Steam inventory: it is gone. Look at the custody account's: it is not there either.

The item is not lost, not stolen, and not in limbo — it is exactly where Valve puts a protected trade. It reappears in the receiving inventory when the window closes.

This is why custody is verified from Steam's trade record, not from inventory contents. Asking "does the custody account hold this item?" answers no for a perfectly healthy deposit, and treating that as a reversal would destroy good deposits. The trade record is authoritative throughout the window, and that is what the protocol reads.

Trade Protection

Steam's protection window on the trade is running, and the deposit is showing a countdown to when it clears.

Action required: none. Roughly seven days from when the trade completed.

Escrow Hold

The same wait, plus an escrow (trade hold) that Steam applied because one of the accounts involved did not meet its security requirements — most often a mobile authenticator that has not been active long enough.

Action required: none now, but note it for next time. Escrow attached to your account comes from Steam's assessment of your account, is reported by Steam on the offer, and cannot be shortened by anything on LootFi's side. An account with a long-established authenticator does not trigger it.

Holds run concurrently — the wait is the longest one, not the total

Trade protection, escrow, and a recent-authenticator hold are all windows measured from the same trade. A 7-day protection and a 5-day escrow produce a 7-day wait, not 12.

Detail: Hold calculation · Escrow & holds.

Ready to Mint

The hold has cleared and the deposit passed a fresh re-verification against Steam's live state. A token id has been allocated and the mint is being sent.

Action required: none. This is usually brief. You pay nothing and sign nothing — the mint transaction is sent and paid for by the protocol.

If a deposit sits here, it means the mint has not confirmed yet. It is deliberately safe to retry: minting an id that already exists reverts on-chain, so a retried mint cannot produce a duplicate.

Minted

Done. The ERC-721 is in your linked wallet and the token id is shown on the deposit.

Verify it independently on the explorer if you like — read ownerOf(tokenId) on LootSkins and confirm it is your address. Addresses are in Deployments.

From here the token is ordinary on-chain property: hold it, transfer it, list it, or withdraw the skin.

Reversed

The underlying Steam trade was reversed, so the item is no longer in custody. No token is created, and the item goes back to where it came from — Valve's process, on Valve's timing.

A reversal signal on your Steam account also pauses every open deposit on that account, not only the reversed one. Each is re-verified individually before anything is allowed to mint; deposits whose items are confirmed still in custody rejoin their normal countdown, and their displayed status stays in the protection band while that happens.

See Trade reversals and Risks & limitations.

Failed

The deposit did not get off the ground — most often because the trade offer was declined, cancelled, expired, or was invalidated by an item moving before it was accepted.

Nothing was taken. Start a new deposit.

Reading a batch

If you deposited several items at once, they are one batch on one trade offer, and the batch displays as a single deposit. Two rules govern what you see:

• The status shown is the least-advanced state in the batch. One item still in Received (Locked) shows the whole batch that way, even if the others are further along.
• The countdown shown is the latest unlock in the batch. Whichever item clears last determines the time you see.

Both are deliberately pessimistic. A batch that displayed the fastest item would tell you it was nearly done while something in it had not started.

If any item in the batch reverses or fails, the batch reflects that state.

Where the countdown comes from

The unlock time is computed from Steam's own trade-initiation timestamp for your trade — not from when you clicked deposit, and not from when our side noticed the trade.

This matters in one specific way: if the true timestamp is learned late (Steam can be slow or briefly unavailable right after a trade), the countdown is corrected to the real one rather than left running from a later fallback. The correction can only ever move the unlock earlier, never later. You are never charged extra waiting time for our side being slow to read Steam.

The countdown is a prediction of when Steam's hold expires, based on what Steam reported. It is not a promise about when the mint transaction lands.

When to be concerned

Genuinely almost never during the first week. In order of likelihood:

Symptom	Likely cause
No trade offer ever arrived	Trade URL is stale or was regenerated in Steam; or Steam is throttling. See Troubleshooting.
Stuck in Received (Locked) for days	Normal. Steam withholds the post-trade identity until protection ends.
Item in neither inventory	Normal. See the callout above.
Countdown longer than ~7 days	An escrow or recent-authenticator hold applies. See Escrow & holds.
Ready to Mint for a while	Mint is in flight or being retried. Safe by construction.
Well past the countdown with no token	Worth looking into — see Troubleshooting.

Do not try to speed a deposit up

There is no action that shortens Steam's hold. Reversing the trade does not refund faster — it freezes every open deposit on your account and re-verifies each one, delaying all of them. Repeatedly retrying a throttled request extends the throttle.

The correct move at every status except Offer Sent is to wait.

Next

• Trade protection — why the window exists.
• Deposit lifecycle — the full state machine.
• Troubleshooting — symptom to fix.