Counter-Strike 2 Trade Protection: what the 7-day reversal covers and what it does not

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Counter-Strike 2 is the first Steam game whose items use Trade Protection, and it is worth knowing exactly what that covers before you accept a trade. The headline is simple: every CS2 item you receive in a trade stays reversible for seven days, and that reversal is the only rollback Valve offers.

What Trade Protection does

When a trade involving Trade Protected items is confirmed, the items arrive immediately and you can equip and play with them right away. For the next seven days they are marked as Trade Protected and you cannot consume, modify, or transfer them, which includes moving them into a Storage Unit. The mark shows up in your Steam inventory and in the trading window. Once the seven days are up, the protection expires and the trade can no longer be reversed.

CS2 is currently the only game with Trade Protected items. Valve says it plans to open the feature to other games, but the FAQ lists only CS2. One practical consequence: all items in a single trade must have the same level of protection, so you cannot swap a CS2 item for an item from a game without Trade Protection in the same trade.

How the reversal works

You start the reversal yourself from your Trade History page, or from the direct trade restore link. When you reverse, every trade containing a protected item from the last seven days is reversed at once. You cannot pick some and leave others.

The items go back to their previous owners, and your account is locked out of trading and the Steam Community Market for 30 days. If you started the reversal, any of your items that were listed on the Market come back to your account and your pending trade offers are canceled.

Only trades that were created as protected, meaning they showed the yellow shield, can be reversed. Trades from before the feature existed are not reversible, and Steam Support cannot change that.

Details people get wrong

The 30 day cooldown lands only on the account that starts the reversal. A trade partner whose trade you reversed does not get a cooldown. Steam Support cannot shorten or remove the cooldown for you. There is no way to opt out of Trade Protection for your items. And CS2 items are not subject to trade holds or escrow, so they move immediately, which is a direct result of Trade Protection.

What the FAQ does not cover

The page describes item reversal, not payment protection. It says nothing about money or skins moved outside Steam, and the process returns items, not anything else. If you pay cash to a stranger for a skin and they reverse the trade inside the window, the path the FAQ describes returns the item to them.

Source

[1] Steam Support: Trade Protected Items