From Meme Coins to CSGO Skins: Speculation Never Sleeps

Written by: TechFlow

You may not have played CS:GO, but you must have a friend who has made some money from it, or of course, has recently lost money.

When the craze of meme coins gradually faded, some speculators who had experienced the ups and downs of meme coins turned their attention to CS skins and discussed the candlestick charts of CS:GO accessories in various coin trading groups. The former coin circle meme hunters have transformed themselves into accessory dealers, and CS:GO skins have become the next wealth code in their eyes.

CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) was officially released on August 21, 2012. In 2013, the weapon box and skin system were introduced and allowed to be traded on the Steam market. Since then, the foundation of the CS:GO accessories economy has been laid. After attempts to make it free and multiple updates, the accessories market has been prosperous for twelve years.

In May 2025, the CS accessories market suddenly collapsed, with the accessories index plummeting by 20% in three days, and the prices of many popular trading products nearly halved, triggering heated discussions among users of various platforms. This sense of market collapse is very familiar to 加密货币currency traders, except that this time everyone is holding virtual gun skins.

Players who have been steadily happy because of the appreciation of skins will no longer be happy overnight.

The hyped market is fragile. How do these skins, which look like NFT and can fall as sharply as Meme coins, attract believers and what will they bring?

Making money, easy thing

In April 2025, the Meme coin market was lukewarm, but the CS:GO accessories market was booming, attracting the attention of many coin players.

It all started with the Arms Deal update in 2013, when skins (also known as accessories, which are essentially graphical overlays that can modify the appearance of weapons in CS) were introduced and could only be obtained as random drops in the game.

This opened up the era of wealth games where opening a box is like a lottery ticket. In order to obtain rare skins that could not be opened, players gradually began to trade spontaneously. The rise of skin trading websites further promoted the prosperity of the market, giving rise to an all-encompassing prosperous ecosystem – players, trading platforms, anchors, dog flippers, black markets, data tools, etc.

Even derived a historical price K-line chart

Source: CSGO STOCKS

But most of the people who feel the ups and downs of the CS:GO skin market started out just for fun.

In 2019, Mantou was still in college. At first, the game was just a game. In his words, After playing for a while, I wanted to buy skins, which was normal for players.

For CS:GO players, skins are not only a kind of decoration, but also a kind of social currency. High-quality or rare skins show the players status in the community and satisfy their vanity. This naturally creates the demand for the circulation of accessories, and also breeds the corresponding market.

After getting to know the market better, Mantou saw that the price of skin care products had risen sharply. Since he was just a college student with little money at the time, he developed the urge to speculate in skin care products.

The amount of his first pot of gold was not large – I made a few hundred yuan at the beginning, and I was happy for a few days.

Compared to making money from skins, for Mantou, buying skins and playing the game are more like complementary things. He has not thought too much about trading strategies, I just want to play, so I buy them for fun, but the fluctuations in the accessories market will also make him return to CS:GO. For example, in April this year, he returned to the game because he heard that accessories are very popular.

In fact, CS:GO and the cosmetic economy it created can indeed be said to complement each other.

Well-known KOL Hua Jiao once spontaneously studied the market economy created by this game out of curiosity. In his opinion, the long-lasting wealth effect of the CS:GO accessories market is inseparable from the attributes of the game itself.

As a shooting game, the CS:GO game mode is very simple and has not changed much since it was first developed. In addition, Valve (the developer of CS:GO) often uses events to stimulate the game, which can attract old players to return quickly 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, constituting the incremental growth of this market.

Vanity prompts players to trade skin accessories, and making money attracts a steady stream of new and old players. Earning money while playing has become the best footnote to the CS:GO game and the accessories economy.

Let the price of jewelry soar

The price range of CS:GO accessories market is amazing, ranging from ordinary skins worth a few yuan to rare treasures worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan, which together constitute this unique ecosystem. It is like the stratification of currencies in the cryptocurrency circle – ordinary skins are like air coins, while top accessories such as dragon snipers and butterfly knives are comparable to BAYC and CryptoPunks in the NFT world. Their prices continue to set new records due to scarcity and consensus premium.

A large number of common weapon cases and ordinary quality skins are at the bottom of the price spectrum. For example, the Snakebite Case may only sell for about $0.36 (about RMB 2.5). These accessories are relatively easy to obtain and have a large supply, so they are affordable and meet the personalized needs of most player bases.

Entering the mid-range, the price of accessories is usually between tens and hundreds of RMB. Accessories in this range often have better appearance designs, a certain degree of rarity, or serve more popular weapons.

Source: CSmoney

At the high end of the market, prices are growing exponentially, with accessories costing thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan. These are usually extremely rare knives, gloves, and legendary or extremely rare top-level gun skins. A brand new M 4 A 4 | Howl that can record kills and comes with rare stickers has a recommended price of $18,324 (about 130,000 yuan) on a second-hand platform.

Source: ShadowPay website article

These high-priced accessories have gone beyond the game props themselves and are regarded as a kind of collectibles and investment items.

Overall, factors such as the appearance, wear, rarity, style, operation of accessories merchants (dogs), student holidays, new product drops and even the anchor effect all affect their market prices. Platforms such as Steams market and third-party trading websites have also played an important role in shaping the CS: GO skin market.

Even if the influencing factors can be rationally sorted out, the arbitrary fluctuations in the price of accessories are still unexpected. This kind of arbitrary behavior is common in the CS:GO accessories market and the cryptocurrency circle.

When CS:GO announced that it would be upgraded to CS 2 in 2023, many high-priced skins and rare stickers saw price increases. However, just a few months later, CS 2 was officially launched, and many skins fell sharply in price due to changes in display effects or adjustments to the drop mechanism, and many players who bought at high prices were trapped. Similarly, the $TRUMP coin launched on the eve of Trumps inauguration was also once popular, but the price of the coin collapsed in an instant after he took office, leaving a mess.

However, the price changes and transactions of accessories seem to be as random and free as memes, but in fact they are all under the control of Valve. The entire economic ecosystem derived from accessories must be adjusted according to the rules of the studio, and Valve has an absolute initiative in it.

Hua Jiao said, It (Valve) controls all the probabilities and the rarity of each skin that pops up, and can tell you where to go. Even the display of skins in the game will change due to game updates. Why does CS 2 have such a big impact on prices? Because Valve changed the display of some skins in the game, some look better, and some look uglier, 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 Valve.

In extreme cases, the accessories market has the risk of what if Valve updates tomorrow and skins can no longer be freely traded. As Mantou said, You cant control the changes in Valves policies, and NFT is easier to operate in this regard.

The story of the cryptocurrency circle is repeated in the jewelry market

The financial management attributes of accessories and their price changes have made many people in the crypto circle exclaim – Isnt this NFT!

This is not nonsense. Even the unintentional “earning while playing” effect coincides with the “玩就是赚” goal pursued by GamFi design.

Although CS:GO accessories can be used in the game, which makes them different from NFTs in terms of practicality, Mantou said that some of the expensive ones are indeed good-looking, but in fact this is only a small part.

The skin has no function, and it doesnt even add three points of attack power. For the vast group of young players, accessories carry more complex psychological needs and social significance. They are a concentrated embodiment of the pursuit of appearance, face culture, and identity symbol, which is similar to the role played by NFT in certain circles.

Professional jewelry trading websites such as Jbskins.com also pointed out that a max gold print of the 2022 Antwerp Championship is not just a simple sticker, but also a symbol of status. Although it cannot improve your skills, it can 定义nitely improve your gaming experience and face.

In addition to their social identity symbolic attributes, the two also have similarities in price drivers.

Huajiao said that the price of certain accessories on CS:GO will increase due to the celebrity effect of anchors and e-sports players, and NFT is mainly a symbol of identity, and (the price) also needs some celebrity effect to increase.

Celebrity endorsements brought by superstar purchases can drive up the NFT floor price, with prices soaring a hundred or even a thousand times in a short period of time. However, once market sentiment changes, liquidity tightens, or negative news appears in the project itself, the NFT price may plummet in a short period of time, causing heavy losses to high-priced buyers.

What is more coincidental is that after the collapse of CS:GO accessories, the cryptocurrency and meme market has quietly recovered. Ethereum, which has been silent for a long time, has risen by nearly 40% in 7 days, breaking through $2,500. Old coins such as $PEPE, $PNUT, and $moodeng have recovered one after another. Some people even speculate that the flow of funds between different virtual assets has formed an alternative blood-sucking effect. Although it cannot be directly proved, this coincidence of capital flow has become a topic of conversation in the cryptocurrency community.

Opportunities and risks always go hand in hand. Before May, CS:GO players, who had been enjoying a period of stable happiness, were faced with an unprecedented price drop.

Mantou had previously earned 50,000 yuan from the appreciation of accessories, but it was wiped out overnight and turned into a loss of 70,000 yuan. When talking about his views on this decline, he, who has played too much in the cryptocurrency circle, seemed very calm. He believed that compared with the previous blunt knife cutting meat and generally 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 slowly recover, it should be a good thing.

After all, from Meme coins to CS:GO accessories, the story of cyber speculation will never end. 市场s, emotions, greed and fear are always reincarnating in different tracks.

The only thing that remains unchanged is that financial freedom is always out of reach, and there will always be someone to take over at the top.

原文链接

This article is sourced from the internet: From 模因币s to CSGO Skins: Speculation Never Sleeps

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