Well, it’s the next day and as most of you may have already saw Valve basically blew up the CS2 market... They extended the Trade Up Contract so you can now trade 5 Covert items into either Knives or Gloves — yeah, that’s right, actual knives and gloves are now trade-upable 🙃 If you've got 5 StatTrak™ Covert items, you can swap them for one StatTrak™ Knife from the same collection as one of those items. Or, with 5 regular Covert items, you can get either a regular Knife or a pair of Gloves, again from a matching collection. The skins market just tanked hard right after this dropped. Covert items are shooting up in value because everyone's scrambling to grab 'em for trades, while knives and gloves are plummeting in price. It's chaos out there. There are probably other ways Valve could've rolled this out without nuking everything so suddenly, maybe phase it in or add some limits to ease the shock. But long term? This is kinda good news. Cool, good-looking skins are getting way cheaper, making it easier for regular players to actually get them without breaking the bank. Now, wondering about the real impact of these new trade-ups? There's about 20 million Coverts out there (not counting knives and gloves already). Even if you traded up every lower-tier skin into Coverts, it'd only add like 9 million more. In the absolute worst-case scenario, if all of those got traded up, it'd roughly double the supply of Knives and Gloves from around 5.5 million to 11 million. That's if literally every skin ends up as a Knife or Glove, which is super unlikely. Way more probable that the total supply bumps up a lot less, so things might stabilize without totally flooding the market. There will probably be a jump in case openings after this news, which would increase the amount of Covert items. All in all, the skins market will stabilize once market participants get a better understanding for how many new gloves and knives there will be in supply. Interesting times ahead 🤔