CS2 skin market sheds $1.8B after knife/glove crafting update

October 23, 2025 (Europe/Stockholm) — The total market value of Counter-Strike 2 skins fell by more than 28% in 24 hours, dropping from a peak of $6.057B to about $4.272B, according to live trackers at PriceEmpire. The slide began immediately after Valve’s new patch added the ability to craft knives and gloves via Trade Up Contracts. Valve has not publicly commented on the price shock. 

PriceEmpire’s dashboards, which aggregate prices across multiple marketplaces, previously recorded the CS2 market cap crossing the $6B milestone in mid-October—underscoring how abrupt the reversal was. 

What changed in the update

Valve extended Trade Up Contracts so players can now exchange:

5 StatTrak™ Covert items → 1 StatTrak™ knife from one of the submitted collections

5 regular Covert items → 1 regular knife or gloves from one of the submitted collections

The patch also reintroduced the official Retakes mode to matchmaking and included map tweaks and stability fixes. Full notes have been summarized by reputable esports outlets and mirrored in the CS community’s patch note threads. 

Biggest decliners

Price trackers and local reports highlighted steep 24-hour drops (often >70%) for a swath of premium items, including certain Paracord Knife | Forest DDPAT, Moto Gloves | Turtle, Bloodhound Gloves | Guerrilla, M9 Bayonet | Doppler, Butterfly Knife | Doppler, and Skeleton Knife | Ultraviolet—all of which were heavily exposed to the new crafting supply. 

Related developments & context

Retakes is back: Retakes returns as an official mode in CS2’s matchmaking alongside the contract overhaul, a pairing confirmed by HLTV and other outlets. 

Market cap context: Ahead of the patch, tracking sites and community analysts celebrated CS2’s market cap surpassing $6B for the first time; within hours of the update, community data watchers noted it had fallen below that level. 

What players and community figures are saying

Anomaly (YouTuber/streamer): “I can confirm the new traded up knives are 100% tradable, just crafted a knife and traded it to Samz.” (Confirming early confusion around tradability.)

Ryan “Fwiz” Wyatt (gaming executive, ex-YouTube Gaming): Described the change as a “savage update,” noting players were crafting high-value outcomes from low-value inputs during the initial frenzy. 

Steam Inventory Helper (tool devs) cautioned that while knife/glove crafting is real, the economics aren’t automatically profitable and shared the functional patch details. 

Market sites (SkinBaron) amplified the official contract rules and signaled that pricing was in rapid flux as traders recalibrated. 

Why prices moved so fast

Allowing five Covert items → a guaranteed knife or gloves fundamentally increases supply of top-tier categories that once relied mostly on case odds and rare unboxings. Traders rushed to arbitrage the new path (especially with cheaper Covert “reds”), which compressed knife/glove prices while pumping demand for Covert inputs—a shift that played out across exchanges PriceEmpire monitors.