You probably all heard about the site called OpSkins. Back in the days, OpSkins was the best website, where you could buy or sell your virtual skins for real money. After the Valve “trade-hold” update, OpSkins didn’t manage to find the right solution and they were out of the game. We all looked for alternative and BitSkins was the obvious choice. Now that BitSkins is out of the picture too, we need to find a replacement once again. Stay tuned to this article and read our top picks for BitSkins alternatives.
What happened to BitSkins
First of all, let’s clarify the most important question, what happened to BitSkins? The founder and CEO of BitSkins made a thread on Reddit announcing that he will shut down the whole site. Some of BitSkins users committed fraud on Steam and used that site to sell stolen items. Therefore, Valve had to lock some of their accounts. Those accounts are now unlocked but Valve won’t be this cooperative if it happens again, which could cost the site a great loss of money. They do not want to operate at such a risk so they are shutting the site down. A similar thing happened to the skin gambling industry as well.
Since we have no reliable way of knowing the source of items or exactly how they were acquired, we believe it is best to not allow further possibility of a similar situation to recur. This can happen to anyone out there, which makes the above incident quite concerning for legitimate users/entities. However, we’d like not to further allow any possibility of this to happen again to our users.
Atif Nazir, CEO of BitSkins
With that being said, we can conclude that BitSkins is out of the business. Let’s try to find the best BitSkins alternatives out there.
BitSkins Alternatives
Everyone got burned once or twice in their life. We all had to experience that to know how the world works. You need to be careful when it comes to money transactions on the internet. There are a lot of scam sites you will probably want to avoid. Take note that every site we list here is checked and a reliable site so you won’t have to worry about anything else than trading skins.
LOOTBEAR
LOOTBEAR is the site where you can rent CS:GO skins. Yes, you heard me right, they rent high-value skins for a monthly fee. Even you can rent out your own skins and earn some money on a monthly basis if someone decides to rent a skin from you. LOOTBEAR also has the option of trading skins like BitSkins used to have, and you can trust that the trades will safely go through as they have more than a million-dollar worth of skins traded every day.
Make no mistake, renting skins is their primary source of income and they intend to keep it that way. What does this mean? It means that the fee for selling or buying skins will be exactly 0%. The sellers can dictate the price and keep all the money for themselves while the buyers can find cheaper skins because there are no fees. It is a win-win situation for both types of customers. Out of all BitSkins alternatives, this is the best one and they surely deserve the first place on our list.
SkinBay
SkinBay is a similar site to BitSkins. You can buy or sell virtual skills from 5 different games, CS:GO, Dota2, Rust, TF2 and H1Z1. The design of the site is also similar to one that BitSkins used to have. You can filter the skins and see their condition and trade countdown right on the front page. The fees on the site are currently at 10% of the selling price with VAT already included. There is also an option to lower your fees if you add “Skinbay.com” to your Steam profile name. A 5% cut is a really small price to pay knowing that you won’t get scammed and you can safely buy or sell skins without having to worry about anything else. This website is reliable and it is one of the best BitSkins alternatives out there.
SkinBaron
SkinBaron is a skins marketplace located in Germany. The site is translated into 4 languages and they accept multiple currencies. You can buy or sell skins from CS:GO, Dota2, TF2 and H1Z1. Everything looks great but there is a catch. This website has really high fees.
SkinBaron charges a sales fee of 15% and a purchase fee of 5% to cover the cost of fraud prevention which is 20% in total. The purchase fee is not applied if the buyer pays with SkinBaron account balance. It looks like we can avoid an extra 5% fee if we simply deposit the money to the balance and then purchase skins. It maybe looks that way but in reality, there are also fees for deposit options on this site.
Every deposit method except for Bank Transfer has a 5% higher fee for depositing directly into balance. Either way, you will pay the same amount of money in the end. Let’s take PaySafe for example. There is a 10% fee for direct skin purchase and 15% fee if you are adding funds to your balance. If you plan to use that payment method, you will have to pay a 30% fee in the end.
All in all, this site is both safe and reliable but really expensive to use.
CS.DEALS
Another site that deserves a place on our list of BitSkin alternatives is cs.deals. This site is primarily made for trading skins and it is similar to cs.money. You can exchange your skins for other skins with a small fee. The higher the value of the skin, the lower the fee. There is also a marketplace option where you can buy or sell your skins. The fees on this site are really low, 1% – 1,5% and 4,5% – 5,0% on keys. There are no deposit fees while the withdrawal fees are from 1% to 3%. However, the majority of the customers use this site to trade skins and you will have to wait for more time to sell your skins. If you want to earn a few extra bucks and you don’t mind waiting for a couple of days more, this is the right BitSkins alternative for you.
I hope this will help you with your next skin purchase. Make sure to read our article about Cheapest CS:GO Knife Skins if you want to buy any.
