jakiro
You may not have played CS:GO, but you must have a friend who has made some money on it, and of course, you may have lost money recently.
As the Meme coin craze gradually faded, some speculators who had risen and fall in the surge in Meme coin turned their attention to CS’s skin and discussed the K-line chart of CS:GO jewelry in various coin speculation groups.The former “Mme Hunter in the cryptocurrency circle” turned into a “goods overturned dog”, and the CS:GO skin became the next wealth code in their eyes.
CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) was officially released on August 21, 2012. In 2013, it introduced weapon boxes and skin systems and allowed trading in the Steam market. Since then, it has laid the foundation for the economic foundation of CS:GO jewelry. After free trials and multiple updates, it has opened up the jewelry market boom for twelve years.
2025In May 2019, the CS jewelry market suddenly collapsed, the jewelry index plummeted by 20% in three days, and the prices of many popular trading products were almost halved, which caused heated discussions among users of various platforms.This sense of market collapse is very familiar to cryptocurrency speculators, but this time everyone is holding a “virtual gun skin”.
Players who have always been steadily happy because of the value-added skins, “will not be happy anymore” overnight.
The market that is hyped is fragile. How will these skins that look like NFTs, fall and fall like Meme coins, attract its followers and what will it bring?
Making money, easy things
In April 2025, the Meme coin market was lukewarm, but the CS:GO jewelry market was in full swing, attracting the attention of many players in the currency circle.
Everything starts with the 2013 update of Arms Deal. The skin (also known as “gear”, which is essentially a graphic overlay that can modify the appearance of weapons in CS) was launched at that time and can only be obtained in the game as a random drop.
This ushered in the era of “lottery out of the box” wealth game.In order to obtain rare skins that cannot be opened, players gradually began to trade spontaneously.The rise of skin trading websites has further promoted the prosperity of the market, resulting in an all-encompassing prosperity ecosystem – players, trading platforms, anchors, “inverted dogs”, black markets, data tools, etc.
Even the historical price K-line chart is derived
Source: CSGO STOCKS
But most people who feel ups and downs in the CS:GO skin market are just for fun at the beginning.
In 2019, Mantou was still in college.At the beginning, the game was just a game.According to his words, “I want to buy skins after playing for a while.” This is no longer normal for players.
For CS:GO players, skins are not only a decoration, but more like a social currency. High-quality or rare skins highlight the players’ status in the community and satisfy their vanity.This naturally created the demand for jewelry circulation and also gave birth to a corresponding market.
After understanding this market more, Mantou saw that the price of skin increased significantly, and he was just a college student who had no money at that time, so he had the urge to “smell skin”.
His first pot of gold was not large – “I made a few hundred yuan at the beginning, so I’d be happy for a few days.”
Compared to making money with your skin, buying skins in the game and playing games is more like a complementary thing.He hadn’t thought about too many trading strategies, “I just wanted to play and then went to buy it.” But the fluctuations in the jewelry market would also bring him back to CS:GO. For example, in April this year, he returned to the trap because he heard that “gears are very burning”.
In fact, CS:GO and the jewelry economy it creates are indeed complementary.
The well-known KOL Huajiao spontaneously studied the market economy created by this game because of curiosity.In his opinion, the lasting wealth effect of CS:GO’s jewelry market is inseparable from the attributes of the game itself.
“As a gunfight game, the CS:GO game mode is very simple and has not changed much compared to when it was first developed.” In addition, V Society (Valve, a developer of CS:GO games) also often uses activities to stimulate, which can attract old players to quickly return due to nostalgia or some other factors.
While being able to quickly attract or retain old players, the promotion of e-sports anchors has also lowered the threshold, attracting a steady stream of “new generation forces” (mostly college students) to enter the market, forming an increase in this market.
Vanity prompts players to trade skin accessories, making money attracts a steady stream of new and old players to take the bait, and making money while playing has become the best footnote to the CS:GO game and jewelry economy.
Let the price of accessories rise
CS:GO’s jewelry market price spans amazing, with ordinary skins worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan, forming this unique ecosystem.Like the currency layering of the currency circle – ordinary skins are like “air coins”, while top jewelry such as Dragon Sniper and Butterfly Knife are comparable to BAYC and CryptoPunks in the NFT world, and their prices are scarce.Sex and consensus premiums keep setting records.
A large number of common weapon boxes and ordinary-quality skins are located at the bottom of the price spectrum. For example, the Snakebite Case may only be sold for about US$0.36 (about RMB 2.5). These accessories are relatively easy to obtain and have a large supply, so they are affordable, meeting the basic personalized needs of most players.
When entering the medium price range, the price of jewelry is usually between a few dozen to a few hundred yuan.Jewelry in this range often has a better appearance design, a certain degree of rarity, or serves more popular weapons.
Source: CSmoney
In the high-end market, prices have shown exponential growth, and jewelry worth thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan is common.These are usually extremely rare knives, gloves, and those with legendary or extremely rare top-notch gun skins.A brand new “M4A4 | Howl” that records kills and comes with rare stickers, the recommended price on second-hand platforms is US$18,324 (about RMB 130,000).
Source: ShadowPay website article
These high-priced jewelry have gone beyond the game props themselves and are regarded as collectibles and investment products.
Overall, the appearance, wear, rarity, style, operation of jewelry merchants (“reversal dogs”), student holidays, new product drops and even anchor effects of jewelry all affect their market prices.Platforms such as Steam’s market and third-party trading websites also play an important role in shaping the CS:GO skin market.
Even if the influencing factors can be sorted out rationally, the price of jewelry is still unexpected.This kind of casualness is common in the CS:GO jewelry market and currency circle.
When CS:GO announced that it was about to upgrade to CS2 in 2023, many high-priced skins and rare stickers experienced price increases. However, just a few months later, CS2 was officially launched. Many skins fell sharply due to changes in display effects or adjustments in drop mechanisms, and many players who bought at high levels were “trapped”.Similarly, the $TRUMP coin launched on the eve of Trump’s take office was also very popular, but the price of the coin collapsed instantly after taking office, leaving behind a mess.
However, the price changes and transactions of accessories seem to be as random and free as Meme, but in fact they are all under the control of the V Society.The entire economic ecology derived from jewelry must be adjusted according to the studio’s rules, and V Society occupies an absolute initiative in it.
Huajiao said, “It (V Club) regulates all probability and the rarity of skin every time it explodes, and can tell you where to go.”Even the display effect of skins in the game will change due to the update of the game. “Why does CS2 have such a big impact on the price? Because V Club has changed the display of some skins in the game, some are better and some are even more ugly,” said Mantou.
The accessories in CS:GO are financial products that can fly, but looking down, the string of this kite is always in the hands of the V Club.
At the extreme, the jewelry market has the risk of “if the V Club updates tomorrow, you will not be able to trade skins freely.”As Mantou said, “You can’t master the changes in V society policies, and NFT is better at operating on this point.”
The story of the currency circle, the jewelry market reenacts
The financial management attributes and price changes of jewelry made many people in the encryption circle sigh- “Isn’t this NFT!”
This is not nonsense, and even the unintentional effect of “playing while earning” coincides with the “play to earn” pursued by GamFi design.
Although CS:GO jewelry can be used in games, which constitutes the difference in practicality with NFTs. Mantou means “some expensive ones are really good-looking”, but in fact this is only a small part.
“The skin has no function, and it doesn’t even add three points of attack power.” For the vast group of young players, jewelry carries more complex psychological needs and social significance. They are a concentrated reflection of the pursuit of appearance, face culture and identity symbols, which is similar to the role played by NFT in some circles.
Professional jewelry trading websites such as Jbskins.com also pointed out that when describing a max golden print for the 2022 Antwerp Championship, it also pointed out that it is “not just a simple sticker, but also a symbol of identity.” “Although it cannot improve your technology, it will definitely improve your gaming experience and face.”
In addition to the symbolic attributes of social identity, the two also have similarities in price drivers.
Huajiao said that the price of specific jewelry on CS:GO will increase due to the celebrity effect used by anchors and e-sports players, while NFTs are mainly based on identity symbols, and (prices) also require some celebrity effect to bring.
Celebrity endorsement brought by superstar purchases can drive NFT floor prices to rise, with prices soaring hundreds or even thousands of times in a short period of time. However, once market sentiment changes, liquidity tightens or negative news appears in the project itself, NFT prices may fall sharply in a short period of time, causing high-level buyers to suffer heavy losses.
What’s more coincidental is that after the collapse of CS:GO jewelry, the currency circle and Meme markets quietly recovered.Ethereum, which has been silent for a long time, rose by nearly 40% in 7 days, breaking through US$2,500, and old coins such as $PEPE, $PNUT, $MOODENG have successively warmed up.Some people even speculate that funds flow between different virtual assets, forming an alternative “blood-sucking effect”.Although it cannot be directly proved, this coincidence of capital flow has become a topic of discussion for the crypto community after dinner.
Opportunities and risks are always born together. Before May, CS:GO players who had been steadily happy for some time had ushered in this unprecedented price jump.
The 50,000 yuan that the mantou made before with the appreciation of jewelry turned into vain overnight and turned into a loss of 70,000 yuan.Speaking of his views on this decline, he seemed very calm when he “played too much in the currency circle”. He believed that compared with the previous “blunt knife cutting”, there was no decline in trading volume. This wave of decline was so large, and the trading volume was quite good. If the jewelry market can attract more attention and recover slowly, it should be a good thing.
After all, from Meme coins to CS:GO jewelry, the story of Cyber Speculation will never end.The market, emotions, greed and fear are always reincarnated in different tracks.
The only thing that remains unchanged is that wealth freedom is always out of reach, and there will always be a buyer at a high position.
