Overnight, Counter-Strike 2's market cap plummeted from $5.9 billion to $4.2 billion, setting its growth back by seven months.
That's because Valve rolled out a surprise update on October 23 that allows you to trade five Covert-quality weapon skins for knives and gloves. In the last 24 hours alone, this change has seen some knives drop by as much as 43 percent in value, while Covert skins have risen as high as 67 percent (via Price Empire).
Valve recently curbed lootbox regulations with the new Terminals system, which allows you to buy skins directly.
We've yet to see what the full impact will be, as the dust has not yet settled; only six hours ago, the market cap was sitting at $5.02 billion. However, not everyone is convinced that the update will completely devalue knives and gloves, and that this is merely a "classic case of market hysteria".
As broken down by FloatDB, a third-party skin database, there are 20 million Covert skins in circulation (excluding knives and gloves), which rises to 29 million if every single lower-tier skin were to be traded. In the unlikely scenario that all of these Covert skins are then traded for...
