On April 3, various Steam API endpoints that facilitate the verifying of trades on P2P marketplaces were removed and caused havoc in the community.

What emerged from this was one of two approaches as a mitigation:

1. Steam Session hijacking (ie. via a mobile app) - typically taken by "large" marketplaces that need to scale (and by some not-as-nice actors)

2. Manual "Escrow" System with Support Team resolving disputes - typically taken by marketplaces that have the resources to manually resolve disputes at the sake of higher costs

Unfortunately, 1) has privacy issues for the long-term health of the P2P economy. While the access the site has to your account is typically short-lived (expires in 24h tokens), it still could conceivably perform other unintentional actions on your Steam account during that time.

And while 2) has the appeal of being more privacy-centric, it is incredibly difficult to offer this kind of system in especially the digital gaming world where fraud is everywhere. It requires scaling your support team, but more importantly, still struggles to allow a user to provide irrefutable proof that they did in-fact send an item to the buyer correctly while preserving privacy.

And this is why we spent this time working on a system that can combine the privacy-centric approach of a pure "escrow" system while also enabling irrefutable evidence when a seller sends an item.

So... how does it work?

As a seller, the main change is that you need to use the CSFloat extension on Chrome (and Firefox in the future) when sending a trade offer. This used to be optional in order to prevent mistakes, but in order to provide a better experience for tracking sales on the site, it is now required.

We'd like to emphasize that the CSFloat extension does not send any private session details about your Steam account such as a session token, your login details, etc... it only provides meta information to improve the seller/buyer experience on the site.

Beyond that, most of the process is as automatic as it was before! It is possible that in some rare cases, a buyer is able to dispute their purchase, and in that case we have the ability for you to provide an irrefutable proof of delivery without sacrificing your privacy -- automatically.

We're committed to open source for over 8 years, and you can view the extension's code on GitHub

Why not just hijack my Steam login?

While this is certainly tempting (and similar to what the largest P2P marketplace in the industry does), we wanted to do everything that we can to avoid this.

Back when CSFloat Market launched in 2020, we didn't actually collect "API Keys" to verify trades for users for the same reason – to collect as little detail as we needed to verify trades scalably.

Having access to your full Steam login session allows a malicious attacker a higher attack surface than a Steam Web API key would. While you may trust your favorite marketplace with your login session, it sets a poor long-term precedent when multiple sites may have your session.

Going Forward

We're sorry for the long downtime, but are excited to offer an even more privacy-centric verification system than before.

This system is designed to be resilient going long into the future – as long as you can trade skins, you should be able to use CSFloat.

TL;DR

Float Appraiser uses machine learning to predict the price that your item will sell for on CSFloat Market. This price is shown beside listings to help inform your purchasing decisions.

Of note, there are various caveats to what Float Appraiser is currently able to predict – we hope to continue iterating on model performance.

Background

On most marketplaces, a listing will typically show a "reference" price that you can compare against. This allows you to quickly see which items are over or under priced.

Notably however, most marketplaces tend to show a "fake" discount that compares their listing prices against the Steam Community Market rather than other Real-Money Marketplaces. This is important to note since Steam Community Market prices are typically 25%+ more expensive.

Before the Float Appraiser, CSFloat Market would also compare against the "Steam Market" price.

So what is this?

We've built an indexing service that looks at the prices for every item in CS2 across all relevant real money marketplaces. From here, we've calculated a blended price that incorporates each marketplace together based on their popularity.

Afterwards, we trained a machine learning model on hundreds of thousands of sales at CSFloat to predict how much we think your item will sell for.

Float Appraiser currently takes the following factors into account:

• The base "reference" price of this item across multiple real-money marketplaces
• The impact of "float value" or wear on the skin's price
  • For instance, the overpay that you'd get for a 0.01 vs 0.06 float value skin
• The relative popularity of this skin, and it's propensity to sell below the typical listing price on real-money marketplaces
• How much CSFloat buyers typically desire this skin

All factors outside of the base price are combined into a single "Item Factor"

Alright, so what's the catch?

Especially for high tier items, the price a buyer is willing to pay can differ heavily based on their own propensity towards that skin (in other words, how much they like it).

As of today, we do not predict the following factors:

• Fade %
• Case Hardened Tier
• Applied Sticker %
• Individual Doppler phases
• Top #X skin overpay (we do not try to overshoot estimates)

We plan to expand the scope of the appraisal system in the future to incorporate these features.

Remember, we're only providing a prediction – the item may be worth more or less than we predict.

So... how do I use it?

All listings on CSFloat Market now automatically show the Float Appraiser reference instead of the old reference prices.

We automatically annotate badges next to the price to denote whether it is "fair" or "great".

When listing new items, you'll be able to see the appraisal value to figure out how much to sell your item for.

What's Next?

We're going to continue iterating on the model to improve performance and potentially predict other factors in skin price.

Besides that, we continue to have our plates full for other features.

Til next time

🎉CSGOFloat is rebranding to CSFloat! 🎉

Why are you doing this?

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is being superseded by Counter-Strike 2, which is set to launch in Summer 2023.

Since the economy is being migrated over, it only makes sense to make our name agnostic to the current Counter-Strike version.

In other words, we'll be prepared for Counter-Strike 3 as well (if Valve can count that high).

How are you doing this?

Over the next couple weeks, you'll see various parts of the site shift over to CSFloat.

All, but not limited to:

• We will now use csfloat.com instead of csgofloat.com
  • You will be auto-redirected to csfloat.com when the time comes
• Our Twitter handle will become @csfloatcom instead of @csgofloat
• The extension will be renamed to CSFloat Market Checker
• Emails will be sent from csfloat.com instead of csgofloat.com

We anticipate to start making these changes August 5th.

Do I need to do anything?

Nope, we're just giving you a heads up! You'll be automatically redirected to csfloat.com soon.

The Future

We keep on saying it, but we'll re-iterate it again: thank you for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We never thought we'd reach this point and are honored to serve you folks.

This change sets us up for the next era of Counter-Strike.

Til' next time

Key Verification is no longer supported on CSFloat, we now use a privacy-centric verification system that you can read about here.

CSFloat Market has been growing rapidly, processing millions in sales per month – today we're announcing changes that focus on improving the selling and buying experience.

Background

Since the beginning, CSFloat Market has been operating somewhat differently to other P2P markets within CS:GO.

CSFloat had the unique ability to verify whether a given seller has traded an item to the buyer without the use of "Steam API Keys." Amidst recent updates on Steam however, we've instead had to fallback to only requesting your Steam API key when absolutely needed.

Why did we do this? We wanted to give users the option to preserve their privacy and account details – something not found on other P2P markets. CSFloat would allow you to revoke your Steam API key at any time.

However, our past approach had some drawbacks, notably:

• We cannot verify commodity items such as stickers
• It requires game-theory based systems to determine at-fault scenarios where a trade fails – this can have false positives
• Sellers must cancel their Steam trade offer within the "grace period" if the buyer doesn't accept -- otherwise they are at-risk of trading away their item after the buyer was refunded
• Malicious sellers can cause a buyer to wait longer than they should to get refunded (lack of knowledge about the pending state of trades leads to longer trade timers)
• Uncooperative buyers require the seller to perform "manual verification" – an additional step for the seller.

As a result, we've been thinking about how we can provide the best of both worlds.

This brings us to...

Key Verification

CSFloat is introducing the ability to attach your Steam Web API key to your CSFloat Market account as a seller.

What are Steam API keys?

Steam Web API keys allow you to use various Steam APIs to interface with your account. For instance, it allows you to view your current trade offers, historical offers, and much more in a programmatic way. See xPaw's excellent documentation to see all the available methods.

Notably, Steam Web APIs provide us the ability to see trade offers you've made from your Steam account – they cannot be used to create or cancel trade offers. The key cannot be used for tasks such as logging into your Steam account, buying games, or creating chats.

Going forward there will be 2 methods to verify trades for your account:

• Key Verification  – the new API key authentication with enhanced user experience
• Inventory Verification – the old "inventory" based system

You will be able to optionally enable key or inventory verification – depending on whether you are comfortable with storing your Steam Web API key with CSFloat. We value your right to privacy and security.

What Benefits Does this Give?

Enabling Key Verification provides the following benefits:

• You will now be able to list to commodities such as stickers and cases (finally)
• You will have no risk of losing your item if you don't cancel a trade offer on time
• Instances such as the buyer cancelling your trade offer will be automatically handled faster
• There will be a 0% chance of you being incorrectly at-fault for a failed trade
• Trades will be verified much faster
• Listings no longer residing in your inventory will be delisted much faster
• Improved inventory fetching reliability

Sellers who enable Key verification will have a special symbol on their listings indicating a smoother experience for the buyer.

How does the flow change?

When an item is purchased from you, you will have to accept or cancel the sale as before. If you don't accept within 30 minutes, the buyer can optionally cancel their purchase.

After you accept, you will have 1 hour to send the trade offer to the buyer.

Once CSFloat detects this, it will automatically notify the buyer to accept the trade offer.

As a seller, you must keep the trade offer open for at least 18 hours. Afterwards, cancelling the trade offer will automatically cancel the sale on CSFloat.

If the buyer declines the trade offer or doesn't accept in time, they will receive a penalty (2% sale price).

If the seller cancels the trade offer before 18 hours have passed, they will receive a penalty (2% sale price).

Going Forward

We highly value the security of your API keys and will never share them or use them outside of the intended purpose of your usage on CSFloat Market.

We hope that Valve will implement OAuth scopes in the future to help mitigate the need for P2P Marketplaces to request API keys.

Conclusion

We hope that these changes improve your overall experience selling and buying on CSFloat. There's more in store for 2023.

And yes, we've been listening to your requests to list stickers on CSFloat for multiple years.

Currently our crypto withdraw process supports USDC through the Polygon network. We hope to expand the supported networks and currencies in the future.

This guide will explain the process of creating a Polygon-supported crypto wallet (if necessary), attaching it to your Stripe Express account on CSFloat, then issuing a payout on CSFloat and receiving the funds.

Why Use Polygon?

Polygon is a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum that is able to provide substantially cheaper and faster transactions.

By using Polygon, transferring USDC costs ~$0.01 instead of >$4.00 in gas fees that you may experience on the main Ethereum network.

Polygon uses the same format of addresses as Ethereum such as 0xbE4e5FfDdef35A912a58a6968559FDead1ccc1BD but requires a crypto wallet that supports adding other networks.

Note that you cannot send USDC on the Polygon chain to a native Ethereum address that expects ERC-20 USDC unless it explicitly supports the Polygon network. You need to bridge it for native USDC first.

Why Use USDC?

USDC is a stable-coin created by Circle with a consortium of members such as Coinbase. Being a stable-coin, USDC is pegged to the US Dollar – meaning that 1 USDC is equivalent to $1 USD. Every USDC is backed by USD assets in order to ensure it's peg with monthly attestations.

USDC is one of the most commonly used crypto stable-coins, with a market cap of ~$40 billion.

By using a stable-coin, you don't have to worry about fluctuating currency prices such as using Bitcoin.

Step 1. Creating a Polygon Wallet

Option A) Using an Exchange (Easy)

The simplest way to use the Polygon network is by directly depositing your CSFloat withdraw into a crypto exchange that supports the Polygon network.

When should I use this option?

• It prevents having to create your own wallet, which is more complex
• You're OK with holding your funds on a custodial wallet (controlled by the crypto exchange)
• You're intending to exchange USDC for another crypto, this is a more direct path than a self-custody wallet.

How do I do it?

You need to use an exchange that directly supports the Polygon network.

For instance, Kraken and Coinbase are both examples of exchanges that support direct USDC Polygon deposits.

On your exchange of choice, make sure you select "Polygon" as the network.

For example, this is what it looks like on Kraken:

Afterwards, you can copy the wallet address it gives you and use it in the next step. Skip to Step 2.

Option B) Self-Custody Wallet (Not as Easy)

If you desire full control over your wallet, you can use your own self-custody crypto wallet that supports the Polygon network.

Of note, if you lose the keys to this wallet, your funds will be lost.

When should I use this option?

• It gives you full control of your crypto wallet without using an exchange
• You are confident and understand how Ethereum and Polygon work
• You understand that losing your wallet's passkey or private key will mean your funds are no longer recoverable

How do I do it?

Installing Metamask

Metamask is a popular Ethereum wallet that supports the Polygon network.

You can install it by going to https://metamask.io/download/ and choosing the platform of your choice (this tutorial will go over the Chrome extension).

Setting Up Your Wallet

After installing Metamask, you need to create a new wallet or import a secret phrase.

If you don't have an existing Metamask wallet secret or don't know what that is, choose "Create a Wallet"

Afterwards, you'll need to setup a password and write down your private seed (keep this secure!).

When you're done this step, you can view your newly created Ethereum wallet!

Adding Polygon to Metamask

Now that your Ethereum wallet is up and running, we need to add Polygon support.

The simplest way to do this is by clicking "Add Polygon Network" at the bottom of https://polygonscan.com/

Alternatively, you can add it manually to Metamask by following their docs.

Afterwards, you can switch between the Polygon and main Ethereum network within Metamask.

Adding the USDC Polygon Contract to Metamask

You've got a Polygon-enabled wallet, but now you need to add the USDC token.

After this step, you'll be able to receive and send USDC on Polygon through your Metamask wallet.

Option 1) Turning on Enhanced Token Detection (Preferred)

Metamask has a feature that can detect tokens in your wallet such as USDC on Polygon.

You can turn this on by going to your Metamask Settings -> Advanced -> "Enhanced token detection"

Option 2) Manually adding the token

If you're a pro, you can add the token yourself, here's how:

Fill in the following details:

• Contract Address: 0x3c499c542cef5e3811e1192ce70d8cc03d5c3359
  • You can view this contract on Polygon Scan

All other details should auto-fill like so:

Step 2. Add Your Wallet to Stripe on CSFloat

These instructions differ depending on whether you've already onboarded with Stripe via CSFloat.

Option 1) Create a New Stripe Account

If you've never onboarded with Stripe via CSFloat, you can visit the withdraw page.

Click on "Onboard with Stripe" and confirm your region as shown here:

Afterwards, click on "Crypto Wallet", set your currency to "USD Coin" and network to "Polygon", then fill in your Polygon wallet address.

Don't see an option for crypto? Check that your country supports crypto payouts on our onboarding page.

Option 2) Add to existing Stripe account

Go to your CSFloat withdraw page and click "Visit Stripe Dashboard" at the top.

Afterwards, click on the account icon in the top right...

Then click "Payout Details" for CSFloat...

Click "Add Account" and enter your crypto wallet details.

Ensure you you set the currency to "USD Coin" and network to "Polygon".

Then fill in your wallet address from Step 1...

Don't see an option for crypto? Check that your country supports crypto payouts on our onboarding page.

Step 3. Withdraw on CSFloat

After you've made sales on CSFloat, you'll be able to withdraw your balance to your crypto account!

If you've followed the instructions correctly above, you should see "Crypto USDC" as an option to withdraw to on your CSFloat withdraw page.

Depending on your country of origin, you should receive the payout within a day -- you can use your Stripe dashboard to monitor when the payout has completed.

Step 4. Using the Funds

If you've deposited directly onto an exchange, you can use the exchange to convert/transfer the crypto.

If you've deposited into a self-custody wallet, you can send it to other Polygon wallet addresses or use the Polygon Wallet Bridge to convert it to native USDC ERC-20 on the ETH chain.

Features

• Infinite loading (load more than 200 results)
• Increased searching limits
• Item History
• Duplicate skins data
• Enhanced Searching (Newest ID, Oldest ID, Recently Updated, Min Age, Max Age, Collection, Only Filters)
• Instant Market Links
• Steam Market Pricing

What If I Already Had Premium?

If you've already purchased premium for the current month, you will still have a lower withdrawal fee of 1.5% until your premium subscription expires. Your subscription will NOT be renewed at the end of 30 days.

If you've recently purchased CSGOFloat Premium and do not feel you'll use the lower withdraw fees, let us know over support and we'll make it right :)

In Closing

We'd again like to thank our users for their loyal support and hope this change helps out traders :)

Want to sell your skins? Join the over 200,000+ users who've sold $5,000,000 in skins on CSGOFloat Market!

Join our community on Twitter, Discord, and Steam.

As part of our commitment to serving our users with the most competitive fees in the industry, we will be revising our fee structure.

Fee Changes

CSGOFloat Market is switching to a much lower static 2% seller sale fee.

That's right, trade to your hearts content with the lowest fees in the industry without having to purchase any add-ons, sell at least $X amount in skins, or deal with BS.

Using this, you can buy and sell skins repeatedly and only ever pay a 2% seller fee on skins you sell.

If you decide to later withdraw your funds to your bank account, crypto, or Stripe, there will be a 0.5% to 2.5% withdraw fee depending on sale volume. This ensures that you will never pay more than your sales fee before, even if you immediately withdraw proceeds from a sale.

Note: You don't have to pay a withdraw fee if you choose to buy a skin instead with your CSGOFloat Funds.

Depending on your trading activity, this change may significantly lower your fees, especially if you buy and sell items repeatedly. If you typically sell an item and immediately withdraw to your bank/crypto, you may not notice much change in fees.

Comparison to Other CS:GO Markets

We continue to have the most competitive fees in the CS:GO market industry and strive to have the best selection for buyers, especially in rare CS:GO skins.

See an incorrect fee? Let us know on Twitter!

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I pay more in fees with this change? No, depending on your trading activity, your fees may be much lower than before.

What about my existing skins that are listed but not sold? They will automatically use the new lower fee structure when they sell.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoy the new fee structure and that it helps you on your CS:GO trading journey!

What are you waiting for? Join the 100,000+ users on CSGOFloat and start buying/selling items, find rare skins, and more!

Join our community on Twitter, Discord, and Steam!

Auctions

Often times, we don't know the "true" value of our skins, especially when they're rare or have unique properties. Auctions are especially useful in these scenarios to figure out it's value.

CSGOFloat Market now allows you to list auctions that can be bid on by other users. Similar to sites such as eBay, when listing an auction you must specify the reserve price and duration.

The reserve price is public and is the minimum amount you're willing to auction your item for. Bidding will start at this amount and if it is not met after the auction expires, the item will be delisted.

The duration may be 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, or 14 days and the timer starts as soon as you list the item.

Once listed, the seller can remove the listing at any time before expiry if it doesn't have any bids. Similar to non-auction ("buy now") listings, you can optionally set a description or make it private.

Bidding

When you place a bid, the funds to satisfy that bid are immediately deducted from your Float Balance. This balance will be returned if you're outbid.

When bidding, you must bid at least more than the previous bid plus an increment. The amount of this increment depends on the size of the bid according to the following table:

For instance, if the current bid is $110, you must bid at least $112.50.

When placing a bid, you have two options:

• Quick-Bid
• Auto-Bid

For Quick-Bids, you can immediately place the next minimum bid from a single button (with confirmation of course!). This allows quick response bidding in the heat of action.

For Auto-Bids, you specify the maximum price that you're willing to pay and our system will automatically outbid other users with the smallest possible increment up to your max price. This means that you may pay less than the maximum price you specified.

You cannot place an auto-bid with a maximum price that exceeds your current balance. If you place an auto-bid and your balance later depletes for other reasons (ie. you buy a different listing) below the maximum price specified, your auto-bid will be evaluated at your new balance instead.

This gets a bit complex, but here's an example illustrating this:

You currently have $1000 in Float Funds and place an auto-bid with a max price of $900 on auction A. Your auto-bid automatically bids the highest at $300 for auction A. You now decide to purchase a different "buy now" listing B with a price of $400. You now effectively only have $600 to bid on auction A and as such, if someone outbids you, your auto-bid will now be evaluated at a max price of $600 instead of $900.

You may choose to remove or overwrite your current auto-bid from your profile, but you cannot remove any existing active bids it placed on your behalf.

It is also possible that a user with an auto-bids in a way that is lower than the next possible increment. If their max price of $5.88 and you bid $5.50, then the system will auto-bid $5.88 on their behalf instead of $6.00.

Bid History

You may also see the bidding history for an item when it is listed. This shows who, when, and how much a user bid. In this instance, the buyer is represented with an obfuscated identifier. This is a randomly generated but stable identifier for each user on the site that cannot be directly linked to their Steam account. This allows you to identify if the same user is outbidding you, but not know who they are.

Watchlists

CSGOFloat Market now allows you to "watchlist" items and track them separately.

You can view your watchlist at csgofloat.com/watchlist and filter it by sold and listed status. You can have at most 50 active listings in your watchlist, but it will store all historical (sold or delisted) listings as well.

When bidding on an auction, you automatically add that item to your watchlist to make it easy to track auctions you're actively participating in. Otherwise, you can add any listing by clicking the "eye" icon in the top right.

Each listing also displays the amount of users currently watching it to signify it's popularity.

Summary

We're super excited to finally share this update with you folks and hope you like it. As always, we're incredibly grateful for the support from the community and appreciate the honor of serving hundreds of thousands of users through CSGOFloat Market, FloatDB, and the extension.

Til' next time, ciao.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

But what exactly are float values and how do they work? How are they generated? How does this influence the probability of getting a low float skin?

The Representation of Wear

As you might expect, CS:GO skins have a dynamic system for computing the texture of each item. When Valve originally designed this, one of their goals was to make skins as unique as possible. As a result, one of those "unique" parameters is how much grunge and wear you see on the skin.

When an item is first created, the CS:GO Game Coordinator sets out the task of generating a random number between the minimum and maximum "float" range for that skin. This number is then used to determine the opacity of the grunge wear texture when the skin is displayed.

By default, if the skin creator has not overridden the range, it tries to generate within 0.06-0.80. You can find more details on this process and distribution on Analysis of Float Value and Paint Seed Distribution.

The closer to 1, the higher the opacity of the wear texture and more wear is shown on the texture.

What Exactly is a Float Value?

Computers represent numbers in binary arithmetic. Representing whole integers such as 1, 2, 3, 4 can be pretty trivial by mapping it to binary bits. For example, the right-most bit represents 1, next one is 2, then 4, etc...

But how would we represent a number such as 0.0000123456 in this type of binary system? In this case, we'd define a float value as a number with arbitrary decimal precision.

For humans, this seems easy given that we can rewrite any arbitrary infinite precision decimal number into scientific notation. For example, 0.0000123456 could turn into 1.23456 x 10^-5. But what about a computer?

IEEE-754, A Standardized Format

As you might expect, there is a standardized format to represent float values called IEEE-754. This format allows us to represent numbers with varying levels of precision given how many bits we allocate to the format.

As we can see above, certain sections of the bit ranges are served for the sign, exponent, and fraction.

To break it down:

Sign: Determines whether the number is negative or not

Exponent: Determines the multiplicative exponent similar to scientific notation. Since we work with binary, the base is 2 instead of 10 and becomes 2^(exp-127). This ranges from -126 to 127.

Significand: 23 explicit bits that allow storing the decimal digits, this leads to roughly 7 digits of precision in 32-bit format.

This all comes together to form this:

So what implications does this have?

Due to the reserved bits in the exponent, representing a number such as 0.00000003498433 is the same amount of space as 0.00000000000000000000000000000000003498433. This is because (in basic terms) the format can simply count how many zeroes it needs to put in the beginning or end.

Another result is that there is a limited amount of bits that can represent the "fractional" portion of the floating point. This is effectively the digits before or after the zeroes. In the 32-bit single precision IEE-754, this gives around 7 digits of precision. This means that we can represent roughly 7 digits after all the zeroes.

Not Really Infinite

While there are theoretically an infinite amount of floating point numbers between 0-1 or 0.0001-0.0002 or 0.000000001-0.000000002, there are only a finite numbers of bits (in this case 32-bits) to represent the float value within. As a result, there are actually a finite number of roughly 1 billion float values that exist within the 0-1 range.

Almost every float value (>0.001) that can exist within 0-1 has a weapon that corresponds to it

You can see this quite easily by looking at the amount of duplicate floats in any given range on FloatDB. Here's an example.

From there, you can also see how 0.34857350587845 jumps straight to 0.34857353568077 (a difference of 0.00000002980232). This just so happens to be after the cut off of roughly 7 digits of precision since you'll simply get an approximation when a value with more precision is encoded.

As a result, it is actually decently probable to get duplicate float values for two unique guns within CS:GO, even the top 4 highest floats in the game are duplicates (but are separate items).

Exponent Woes and Uniform Distributions

While being able to represent seemingly infinite precision is pretty cool, it makes our lives a bit more difficult when we try to generate a number between 0-1 with a uniform distribution.

What this means is that, if we generate a number between 0-1, each number should be equally probable to be picked. The problem is that there are many more representable float values between 0 and 0.0001 due to the exponent explained above. Float values are distributed logarithmically, not uniformly.

In fact, over 75% of float values between 0-1 exist within the 0-0.0001 range.

This is a problem, since if we just naively generate a random float between 0-1 it has a 75% of being between 0 and 0.0001. That's not uniform!

How CS:GO Uniformly Generates Floats

Valve has built a very large code base on the Source engine, which includes utilities for generating random numbers (turns out games like to incorporate randomness, who woulda known).

One of these is a Uniform Random generator in the Source SDK capable of generating random floats and integers distributed uniformly within given ranges.

Due to my previous attempts in reverse engineering how skins work, I ported this random generator into Golang here. We're able to independently verify that this is in-fact the same generator used to create float values on Valve's servers (aka. Game Coordinator).

But how does this generator fix the uniform distribution problem with floats?

Well, it turns out there's a pretty simple answer. What the game does is effectively try to generate a random integer within 0-2147483647 (max signed 32-bit integer) and simply divides the result by 2147483647.

This allows us to effectively generate 2147483647 unique floats between 0-1, uniformly distributed. But remember how there are only around a billion floats that can actually be represented in IEEE-754 within 0-1? Well, the system then tries to find the closest IEEE-754 to the random number it picked, which is then chosen as the approximation. In real terms, this cuts the amount of representable float values down around 10 fold.

Probability of Very Low/High Floats

It turns out that we can figure out what the lowest float skin in the game can actually be. Currently, it is the 0.00000000089966 M249 | Gator Mesh.

If we take 0.00000000089966 * 2147483647, we find that it likely originally generated the number 3 out of 2147483647 (when taking into account the float range).

If we run Monte Carlo simulations, the odds of getting the new lowest float skin with a skin in the range of 0-1 is roughly 1 in a billion.

The lowest possible float is heavily dependent on max float range since it is effectively a multiplier. The M4A1-S | Hot Rod has one of the lowest max floats of only 0.08 and likely one of the lowest in the game. This would give us a lowest possible float at 0.08 *  1 / 2147483647 = 0.00000000003725.

In terms of the highest float in the game, unfortunately there is a cap hard-coded with a max of 1-1.2e-7, which is what you see as the highest float in the game on FloatDB.

Final Thoughts

It turns out that it is much harder to hit the lowest possible float value than to hit the highest (which has already been done 4 times!). Float values are approximations and due to their finite nature, we can find duplicate floats at almost every wear range.

If you'd like to learn more, check out our blog post on the distribution of float values and paint seeds.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

Since the beginning of FloatDB, one of our missions was to catalog every skin in the game and allow searching the database quickly. Project Vault furthers this with the largest data mining effort conducted on Steam (that we know of), enabling the community to gather greater insight into the economy.

TL;DR

Project Vault is a massive data mining effort of over 700 million CS:GO inventories fetched. This data feed will be released uniformly over the next week or two to FloatDB and will contain around 100 million new skins and the updated locations of another 100 million skins. We hope you're as excited as we are, and we have more data than just CS:GO skins cough Kato 14 cough...

Along with this, we're introducing Float Premium which allows you to see item history, duplicated items, Steam Market sale history and listing price, and more!

With that out of the way, if you'd like a deeper look into the details, feel free to read on.

History of Finding Skins

In order to understand the importance of this project, it's useful to look at how FloatDB finds new skins and updates items. When originally bootstrapped in April 2019, we used a friend graph mining algorithm to find inventories in the game. This method effectively crawled friends of Steam profiles, their friends, etc... This enabled us to quickly get 250 million items cataloged and was stopped once we could no longer find new friend links.

Unfortunately, while this search is more efficient in finding inventories that likely have CSGO items, it misses inventories that are not well connected in the Steam friend graph.

In addition to this, we also offer the CSGOFloat API which allows API consumers and the over 100k CSGOFloat Extension users to query item data for skins as they browse Steam inventories and the Steam Community Market. We get hundreds of millions of item data requests per month, which continually adds new items to the database.

Even with all these requests, we still had blind spots and were itching to finally achieve the holy grail of data sets...

Project Vault

Unlike our previous data mining efforts, we wanted the most comprehensive data set possible, which is only achievable by fetching (almost) every inventory on Steam.

You might think, how is that even feasible? Aren't there hundreds of millions of Steam accounts? Yeah, we're kinda crazy.

It first starts with figuring out how to iterate every account that has been created. You might have seen Steam IDs such as 76561197960265728 which represents the SteamID64 of the user. The lower bits of this ID actually contain an auto-incrementing account number.

This means that we can effectively generate the SteamID64 for the first, second, third, etc... accounts that were ever created on Steam. There's a bit more complexity to the SteamID64, but for most publicly created user accounts, it's pretty simple.

Fetching Nearly a Billion Inventories

Now that we can iterate over every possible Steam ID, we still need an effective method to actually fetch the inventories for each account. As you might already know, Steam inventories are very unstable, have heavy rate limits, and requires a game-coordinator connection to actually fetch item data such as the float value.

Thanks to @cantryde who tipped the existence of a method that was able to make these restrictions less annoying, but also have the ability to fetch some types of private inventories.

With that out of the way, we set out to complete the mining over a multi-week period conducted on multiple servers, eventually reaching our target Steam account numbers. We also wanted to ensure that our mining efforts didn't cause performance degradation for other users on Steam.

From there, we've now setup the infrastructure to ingest roughly 200 million new inspect links which will be added to FloatDB over the next week or two.

Not Just CS:GO Skins

While finding new skins that haven't been cataloged before is very exciting, we also saw this as an opportunity to find cold-hard data on some interesting metrics the community might like.

Most notably, we have been cataloging the locations of every Katowice 2014 unapplied sticker that we came across, and we'll be doing a full post on the actual amount of stickers in this category.

This also gives us the opportunity to tackle a problem we've longed to solve - showing duplicated items. Back in the day, Steam support used to duplicate items if a user was scammed, essentially creating multiple copies in the economy (this was abused a lot). Project Vault allows us to properly see how many duplicated skins there are and present this info.

Float Premium

We've been cooking up some updates that allow further insight into the CS:GO economy and FloatDB specifically. You can find more details here but let's show some key features:

Item History

This has undoubtedly been one of the major things we wanted to add to the database for quite some time. Item history allows you to see the lineage of an item as it is traded and sold.

We wanted to take it one step further however, so we've also cataloged data on the exact price that an item has historically been sold on the Steam Community Market. This should help you find a long-lost skin or bargain for an item.

Note: Item History is applicable to updates that occurred after 05/05/2020

Lower Fees

Instead of starting at the standard 4.5% fee, Premium users start at 3.5% on Float Market.

If your sale volume permits a fee lower than 3.5% and you have premium, we'll use that fee instead. You can find the full table here.

Enhanced Filters

Float Premium introduces new searching filters such as min/max update age, Steam Market listing price, whether the item has been sold on Steam Market already, collection search, and sorting by recently updated.

We've also made the Newest/Oldest ID sorting a premium feature in order to help prevent abuse.

Dupes and Listing Data

As we mentioned earlier, Project Vault has enabled us to collect data on how many duplicates of an item is in existence. With Premium, we now show a column indicating how many times an item was duplicated. You can go to the item history to find the locations of dupes.

We've also annotated a column with the current listing price of the item on Steam Community Market and whether it has already been sold.

Conclusion

We're excited to finally share this with you guys and hopefully you find use from Project Vault and Float Premium. Who knows what new #1 float ranked skins or 4x Katowice 2014 iBuyPower skins await us.

This has been a journey, and we're glad to be a part of it.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

As a primer, CSGOFloat API allows users to fetch item data such as the "float value" and "paint seed" of CS:GO skins which determines how worn the item is and random displacement of the texture. This is used heavily by traders when evaluating the value of an item.

Natively Steam inventories don't show this information and requires a third-party add-on, such as our extension, in order to show.

How We Retrieve Item Data

Back in the day, there used to exist an endpoint which, using a Steam Web API Key, would provide detailed item data about a user's inventory. Unfortunately this endpoint was incredibly unreliable, spammed heavily, and eventually shut down by Valve.

After this was shut down, the community had to migrate to a separate method which involves impersonating the Protobufs that the game uses to connect to the CS:GO Game Coordinator and "inspect" the item.

There is a big limitation to this however, one of which being that the "inspect" protobuf call is limited to 1 request per second. In order to serve hundreds of requests per second, this will simply not be enough, so it's time to parallelize...

Parallelizing CS:GO Network "Clients"

Running hundreds of actual game instances in order to fetch this data isn't feasible or maintainable, so the community has developed projects such as node-csgo and node-globaloffensive that has the ability to emulate the network requests that the real CS:GO client uses in order to interact with the Game Coordinator.

In doing so, we can "run" hundreds of network clients at once that will fetch item data on-demand from a pool of API requests and queue them up properly on commodity hardware. Granted, this does require creating hundreds of Steam accounts, but that's the price you pay (well, more free since CS:GO went free-to-play).

Caches Are Crucial

So we have the ability to fetch the data for a couple hundred items per second, now what? Well, it turns out that CS:GO's Game Coordinator isn't the fastest thing in the world.

If we fetch item data from the Game Coordinator, it typically arrives in 500-700 milliseconds. There are also many instances in which the coordinator drops messages as well, so we have to contend with retrying requests if it doesn't reply in time.

As a result we have a cache, which is effectively FloatDB, which serves two purposes: 1) It allows us to lookup a previously fetched item in <1ms 2) It allows users to search across all skins in the game.

In addition to this, many requests are duplicates, so we have a Cloudflare edge-cache that can re-deliver a response closer to your geographic location. As more people use the CSGOFloat API, our cache (FloatDB) becomes more comprehensive, which makes the API calls for all users faster – it's a win-win.

Conclusion

Our float fetching service is available as Open Source on GitHub if you'd like to host it yourself and fetch item data.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

Lineage of Tracking CS:GO Items

Back in the good ol' days, when the discovery of float values was new and no one had mobile authenticators, there used to be an endpoint that showed very detailed data about the state of a user's inventory (https://api.steampowered.com/IEconItems_730/GetPlayerItems/v1/).

Ever since float values were discovered, people realized the only way to retrieve it was by querying this endpoint. As a result, many sites such as CSGOExchange popped up allowing you to query this endpoint but it was incredibly unstable and spammed by many...

This endpoint had something unique that no others did, in addition to float values, it also contained an "original id" for an item. This was the original asset id of the item and would never change even if the item was traded. By default, every time an item is traded, the asset id changes.

This allowed sites like CSGOExchange to easily track where items went by just seeing if the original id matches to any item they've already seen. If they haven't cataloged the original id before, it must be a new item!

Unfortunately, back in 2017, Valve decided to close down the endpoint and permanently prevented the community from obtaining the original ids of items. So we had to adapt...

A New Way To Get Float Values

Before the endpoint was closed in 2017, there existed another method to get the float value. The pursuit of finding this method was mainly to allow inspecting the float value of items listed on the Steam Community Market which the endpoint didn't allow.

This utilized reverse engineering the network protocol that CS:GO runs in order to replicate how the game handles "inspecting" an item in-game. The creation of CSGOFloat was originally in the pursuit of developing this method and allowing users to fetch floats for SCM listings (turns out a bunch of people figured it out at around the same time).

There were some restrictions to this system since you needed to impersonate a game client and could only send 1 float request per second per bot (which still exists to this day!). It returned the float value, paint seed, def index, and paint index of items, but unfortunately didn't give the original asset id.... so how can we track it?

A (Different) Way To Track Items

In the face of this dilemma, we needed to be able to derive a method that can uniquely identify an item even if it was traded many times. For us it is important that we can check whether a new item we see is actually new or is just an updated location of a pre-existing item that was traded.

There are basically around 4 high-entropy properties that are immutable (never change) about an item even if it is traded: the float value, paint seed, def index, paint index.

So if we combine all of these properties together to uniquely identify an item, is that enough?

Well, there are around 300 million+ float values that are usable within the 0-1 float range, 1001 uniformly random paint seeds, and around 1000 different skins in the game (combos of def index and paint index).

Combined with some napkin math, the odds of two items being generated with the same attributes is on the order of 1 in 300 trillion. Unfortunately, due to the Birthday paradox, we'd expect a collision between two items to have a probability of 1 in 17.3 million.

There are around 500 million skins existent in CS:GO, so this gives us an expected 30ish natural collisions where two items are generated with identical properties. Should be good enough, right? Yes, and this is what we use on FloatDB for tracking items. But there are some downsides...

The Duplicated Items Saga

So in theory, an item generating with duplicate properties should be pretty improbable, but what if someone had the ability to duplicate an item?

Well it turns out that Steam Support did just that. Back in the day, whenever an item was scammed from a user, Steam Support would just duplicate it and now two items with those properties would float around the economy.

For our tracking system, how in the world could we figure out that there are two instances of this item since they'd have the same unique "key"? Well, we can't...

Sites like CSGOExchange choose a different approach, which basically shows an item as duplicated if the older inventory that has traded an item hasn't been refreshed yet on the site. This leads to a high amount of false positives of "duped items".

FloatDB chooses an alternative approach of only showing the most recent item we've found for a given unique "key". This results in us showing any duped items as a single item with the most recent inventory. We are however working on something that can show us all the duped items, so stay tuned...

What Can't We Track?

As I alluded to earlier, using this method has a couple drawbacks.

One of which is that if the item cannot be inspected in game (i.e. has no inspect link), we can't use the in-game inspect network request to get it's details. This applies to items like sticker capsules.

Another is that some items simply don't have high-entropy properties like skins do in order to develop a unique key for them. For instance, unapplied stickers don't have a float value or paint seed and therefore don't have any values we can combine to uniquely identify them. As a result, we don't track stickers since we couldn't possibly have an accurate metric on how many exist and where they are. Sites that provide this kind of metric are typically very flawed in their data.

Conclusion

As you'd expect, everything has its pros and cons; thankfully tracking items this way works very well in practice.

If you'd like to browse the full database of over 330 million unique skins, be sure to check out FloatDB.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

As a small primer, every skin in CS:GO is generated with random attributes when it is opened in a crate or dropped in-game. The main attributes that matter to most traders are the "float value" and "paint seed". The float value determines the opacity of wear that is on the skin, and the paint seed defines random scale, translate, and rotation transformations that are applied to the skin texture.

Float Value Distribution

As stated earlier, float values in CS:GO determine the amount of wear a skin has, and typically ranges from 0-1. The closer to 1, the more worn or "Battle-Scarred" the skin will look. To be a bit more technical, these are IEEE 754 32-bit floats that carry quite a bit of information. If you saw numbers such as 0.07239230 next to a skin, it was likely the float value.

Let's look at how the distribution of float values are for all the AK-47 | Case Hardened skins:

We can see that the distribution is uniform only within a given range of 0.0-0.07, 0.07-0.15, 0.15-0.38, 0.38-0.45, 0.45-1.00. This lines up perfectly with the wear ranges of Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, Battle-Scarred.

If we take the percentage of items in each bucket out of every AK-47 | Case Hardened wear, we get this:

So if you open a case in CS:GO and it is determined that you will receive a AK-47 | Case Hardened, there is a 3% that it is Factory New.

The Case of the Missing Float Values

You might have noticed above that there is a gap between the buckets in the above graph between each wear range (ex. 0.07-0.08) and chalked it up to some graphical error. But there actually are missing float values from skins that are unboxed from crates!

For example, there are no M4A4 | Magnesium skins with a 0.07-0.08 float on FloatDB because you can't trade up to it and it has a wear range of 0-1. This doesn't apply to skins generated from trade-ups since the formula is different.

Why does this gap exist? Well, maybe Valve wanted to differentiate the difference between wear ranges in a more prominent way, so they introduced a gap to make the next more worn range more noticeably worn, even if it generated a float value that was the best for that range.

Capped Float Ranges

If you're a more experienced trader, you'd know that not all skins have a 0-1 float range. In fact, most of the skins from the original collections in 2014 were generated with a 0.06-0.80 range and it is actually the default in the game files unless the skin creator overrides it. This is typically needed when a 0.06 minimum float would look too worn for a skin, even if it generated the best possible wear.

So what does the float distribution look like if the range isn't 0.0-1.0? Here's an example with the Negev | Loudmouth, a range of 0.14-0.65.

You can see that there's a similar shape to the distribution as the AK-47 | Case Hardened example we saw above, but compressed into the wear range of 0.14-0.65.

What this means is that if your skin doesn't have a wear range from 0-1, two guns spawning that are both Field-Tested do not necessarily have the same probability of float values. In this instance, we can see that getting a Field-Tested skin in 0.18-0.22 is much more probable than a Field-Tested skin in 0.22-0.26.

From this graph it looks like skin generation generates a 0-1 float according to the probability table above, then determines the final value from the calculation:

final_float = float * (max_float - min_float) + min_float

If you'd like to see the wear range for any skin in the game, you can browse them in the CSGOFloat Trade Up Calculator. There are little black marks on the float bar where the min and max range is.

Float Value Extremities

One of the main parts of collecting skins is not just having a lower float value, but having of the lowest or highest float skins in the game.

So how does the distribution of float values look as we go towards the very low end (<0.002)?

As we can see, it still remains uniformly random even when reaching these lower values.

We've personally done a bunch of analysis on how float values in CS:GO are generated, and we actually know the exact randomness generator they use server-side in order to create these values. If you're interested, we've ported their generator into Golang if you feel like testing something out.

Within a given wear range such as 0.15-0.38, the float generator aims to generate the float in a uniform-random way. In other words, any float in that range should be as probable as a another. Generating a 0.0000001 float skin should be as probable as a 0.0330487324 skin if there is a 0-1 wear range.

Paint Seed Distribution

While float value controls how much wear a skin has, the paint seed controls how the texture is placed on the skin. The paint seed ranges from 0-1000 and is used as a "seed" to a random number generator in order to output random transformations to the x, y offset and rotation of the skin and wear textures.

Not all skins are affected by the random displacement of a paint seed, but you've probably noticed that skins such as AK-47 | Case Hardened all look different – this is why. If two AK-47 | Case Hardened skins have the same paint seed, the blue and gold will be in the exact same place across both.

So when CS:GO generates the paint seed for skins, what does the distribution look like?

Given the 50,000 sample size, it is likely fine to assume that it is generated uniformly random across the 0-1000 range. ie. a 456 is as probable as a 964 paint seed.

Fun Fact: A 1000 paint seed is only possible if it originated from a trade-up.

So this shows us that the #1 pattern for an AK-47 | Case Hardened with a paint seed of 661 has a 1/1000 chance of occurring if you unbox an AK-47 | Case Hardened.

Skewed By Trade Ups

Due to how trade ups work, typically they are skewed towards having lower float value outputs since many skins have a max float less than 1. We'll likely have a post in the future diving deeper in the math of trade ups.

Since the community has reverse engineered how float values interact with trade ups, they can more easily be "gamed" to produce an item with lower float. You can play around with this in our Trade Up Calculator.

Here's how it looks like for the AWP | Dragon Lore:

Quest Reward Dragon Lores originated as a drop in the game rather than being traded up to and therefore can't have their float manipulated. As a result, it looks similar to the distributions we saw above (the missing floats aren't as visible due to the x-axis scaling).

Final Thoughts

It's actually incredible that there is so much depth into how items are generated in CS:GO. These properties have spawned float collectors, incredibly rare skins, and allows the ability for a third-party database to exist.

If you'd like to browse the full database of over 330 million unique items, be sure to check out FloatDB.

Want to join our community? Follow us on Twitter or join our Discord and Steam Group.

We’ve made a couple of changes to the trading system to improve the experience for both buyers and sellers.

• Sellers must now “accept” or “cancel” a sale before delivery, cancelling a sale will inflict a 2% fee upon the seller.
• Buyers can now optionally cancel their purchase if the seller hasn’t accepted the sale within 30 minutes.
• If the seller “accepts” the sale, they have the offline timer of 12 hours + 8 hour grace period regardless of their online status.

This should help provide greater flexibility to both buyers and sellers. If you have further suggestions, please join our Discord to talk about it!

Affiliates

If you’ve got a YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, or website with a following, you can now apply to be an affiliate through CSGOFloat and get a portion of the purchases collected from users you refer to the site!

You can find more details on conditions to apply here: csgofloat.com/affiliate

We are always looking to improve the site with community suggestions and would love to hear your input on our Discord, Twitter, or Steam Group.