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We see similar examples in the real world: people can buy fractions of gold, trade oil futures, or hold shares in companies.
And they’re not moving the gold bars or oil barrels themselves; they’re trading claims on those assets.
That works because the financial system has trusted infrastructure: institutions that store the assets, clear the trades, and keep every balance in sync.
Game items have value too, but that kind of infrastructure doesn’t exist here. Steam isn’t a custodian network, and no one is clearing or synchronizing trades between markets. Every site runs its own closed system.
To build a market that behaves like finance: with instant execution, continuous pricing, and transferable claims we needed the equivalent of those rails. Blockchains give that out of the box: atomic settlement, open ledgers, programmable liquidity, and an accounting layer any platform can plug into.
Without it inventory would just be another peer-to-peer wrapper around Steam trades: slow, illiquid, and impossible to scale beyond a few hundred users.
On-chain, it becomes a proper market structure: every skin backed by a real asset, every trade settled instantly, and every price formed in the open.
The trade-offs
You can’t hold a real skin unless you have enough tokens to redeem it.
That’s the trade-off. Liquidity comes from fractional ownership, and fractional ownership means separation between the token and the physical item.
But each token keeps its value because it’s backed by something real: a skin sitting in the vault. 
