Steam rules & limits

Every constraint on this page belongs to Steam, not to LootFi. The item you deposit is a Steam item for its entire life; Steam decides when it can move, who may hold it, and whether a trade stands. LootFi schedules around those rules and cannot override any of them.

This page is the whole picture on one screen. Each section links to a page with the detail.

Before you deposit — the checklist

Requirement	Why it matters	How to check
CS2 items only	The protocol tokenizes Counter-Strike 2 items (Steam app 730). Items from any other game cannot be deposited.	The picker only lists your CS2 inventory. See What you can deposit.
The item is tradable	Steam blocks the trade outright if the item is not tradable. Non-tradable items never appear as depositable.	Hover the item in Steam — a non-tradable item says so on its description.
Inventory set to Public	Your inventory is read over Steam's public interface. A private or friends-only inventory reads as empty, which looks identical to owning nothing.	Steam → Profile → Privacy Settings → Inventory → Public.
A valid trade URL saved	The deposit offer, and later your withdrawal offer, are both sent to this URL.	See Account requirements.
Mobile authenticator active 7+ days	Steam applies a 15-day hold to trades from an account whose authenticator was added or moved recently.	Steam Mobile app → Steam Guard.
No trade ban or market restriction	A trade-banned, community-banned, or locked account cannot trade at all, so no deposit can complete.	Steam → Profile → your bans are shown publicly.

One rule covers most surprises

If your authenticator has been on the same phone for more than a week and your inventory is public, you will hit the ordinary ~7-day wait and nothing else.

The three holds, at a glance

Hold	Length	Steam applies it when	Can LootFi shorten it?
Trade protection	~7 days	Always, to any traded CS2 item. Measured from Steam's own trade-init time.	No
Escrow / trade hold	Up to 15 days	Either side of the trade has a hold on their account. Steam reports the number of days on the offer.	No
Recent-authenticator hold	15 days	A Steam Guard mobile authenticator was added, or moved to a new device, recently.	No

Detail: Trade protection · Escrow & holds

The rule that surprises everyone

Holds run concurrently, not back to back. All three clocks start at the same moment — Steam's trade-init time for your deposit — and run in parallel. Your wait is the longest single hold that applies, never the sum of them.

  receipt (Steam's trade-init time)
    |
    |==== trade protection  ~7 days ======|
    |==== escrow  0-15 days (Steam's number) ==============|
    |==== recent-authenticator hold  15 days ==============|
    |                                                      |
    +------------------------------------------------------> item is tradable
                                                             from here

    the LONGEST bar wins  —  7d + 15d + 15d is NOT how this works

So a deposit with a 15-day escrow waits 15 days total, not 22. A deposit with no escrow and a settled authenticator waits about 7 days total. A deposit with both a 15-day escrow and a 15-day authenticator hold still waits 15 days.

The protocol computes the unlock as the maximum of the three windows and adds a small safety margin before minting, so it can only ever be slightly late — never early. The arithmetic is written out in Hold calculation.

What LootFi cannot shorten

Any hold Steam applies to your account or to the trade. There is no setting, no support ticket, and no fee that shortens a Steam hold — not on our side, and in most cases not on Steam's either.

What LootFi does control is everything after the hold: the item is verified still in custody, and the token mints to your wallet. That step is quick and adds no days of its own — it is the only part of the wait that is ours, and it is not the part you are waiting on.

During the wait, the item is in neither inventory

For the whole protection window your skin has left your inventory and has not arrived in the custody account's. Steam shows it nowhere. This is the normal, healthy state of a deposit that is working correctly — see Trade protection.

Things that can go wrong

Situation	What happens	Page
Steam Support reverses the trade	Every open deposit on that Steam account is paused and re-verified before anything mints.	Trade reversals
Steam throttles automated requests	Deposits pause until the block clears. Retrying makes it last longer.	Limits & timing
Your trade URL token is regenerated	Pending withdrawal offers can no longer be delivered until you save the new URL.	Account requirements
Your account cannot trade	No deposit or withdrawal can complete while the restriction lasts.	Account requirements

Where to go next

• Depositing for the first time: Deposit a skin
• Watching a deposit in flight: Track your deposit
• Getting the real item back: Withdraw your skin
• What you are trusting an operator for: Trust & security