One item.
Two price systems.

The measurable gap: these offers cannot be matched by a Steam listing at the same USD figure. Valve’s own Community Market FAQ archived 2026-09-21 ↗ states an approximately $1,800 maximum listing price. A seller could still list below it; whether that would be acceptable is the seller’s choice. A separate CSMarketCap search for items above $1,800 ↗ shows Factory New Dragon Lore across 28 indexed markets with about 1.1K displayed offers; mirrored inventory can be counted more than once.

The policy contradiction: Valve's own Subscriber Agreement archived 2026-09-21 ↗ reserves commercial exploitation of Steam services unless expressly permitted, while its 2016 statement archived 2026-09-21 ↗ said gambling operators were already using Steam OpenID and automated accounts. That is direct evidence Valve knew of this class of outside operator in 2016. Yet the official marketplace cannot post the observed prices of these high-value items. That is architectural dependence on off-Steam price discovery and transactions; the contract status of each individual marketplace requires separate evidence. The two primary Western marketplaces capturing this over-cap transaction volume operate as formal corporate entities in major jurisdictions — CSFloat Inc. (incorporated in Delaware, USA) and Skinport GmbH (registered in Stuttgart, Germany, HRB 764879) — openly transacting hundreds of millions in peer-to-peer item sales relying directly on Steam Web APIs and trade infrastructure.

Why this matters to the rest of this dossier: these are not abstractions. A few hundred copies of each trophy exist on the open shelf worldwide, each tied to one Steam account and moved by one Steam trade. A market this thin is one where a single stolen inventory is a measurable event, and where the account-takeover techniques documented elsewhere in this investigation have a direct and quantifiable payoff.

The structural point: Valve's market stops at about $1,800. Third-party marketplaces carry the trade to around $66,000 where several of them agree, and to roughly $150,000 where only one does. Above that there is no venue at all — the largest transfers of Valve-issued property happen privately, between individuals, with no listing, no platform record, no identity check and no reporting. The transfer itself still runs on Steam. The higher the value, the less anyone can see it, and the infrastructure carrying it is Valve's throughout.