New CS2 inspect links

[Josiox]

Hello everybody. Did you notice that valve just changed the representation of cs inspect links?

This is how it looks now:
steam://run/730//+csgo_econ_action_preview%2092826859045B28938A6E91B20991BA94A291AA016F546091D24895FAE5E29A90E5B003


Any ideas how to get asset id, server inspect id or owner id from it? Any ideas why they did that?

[GreenPerl]

Hi,

My guess is that they changed it when they made listed items on the Community Market remain in your inventory. Since there were previously two inspect link structures, one for the market and one for the inventory, they seem to have merged them into one general inspect link structure ("masked" inspect link)

You can extract the asset ID from it (itemid), but I do not think the steamid ("ownerid") can be extracted from it.

You can decode from the "Item certificate" (here being: 92826859045B28938A6E91B20991BA94A291AA016F546091D24895FAE5E29A90E5B003)

To the protobuf (CEconItemPreviewDataBlock) and from there also the item details:

{
  "defindex": 508,
  "inventory": 119,
  "itemid": "50082457082",
  "origin": 8,
  "paintindex": 411,
  "paintseed": 986,
  "paintwear": 1045544595,
  "paintwear_float": 0.20482854545116425,
  "quality": 3,
  "rarity": 6
}

 

I "vibe-coded" also a repo for this: Repository

So in short the repo does this:

1. Hex-decodes the certificate.
2. Uses the first byte as the XOR key.
3. XORs every byte with that key.
4. Drops the leading `00` byte.
5. Drops the trailing 4-byte trailer/checksum.
6. Returns the remaining bytes as the protobuf payload.

Also i saw that, with this change, the market history (and trade history) no longer expose valid inspect links anymore only references to , at least for "skins"/non-common items.

Edited March 16 by GreenPerl

[Dr. McKay]

Support for this new form of inspect link has been added to globaloffensive v3.3.0. While it's not actually required to connect to the GC to decode these, if you want to avoid making code changes (and support older styles of inspect links) then this will work as a drop-in upgrade.

[Alberto]

Hello,

I'm using a local decoder + your solution introduced on 3.3, but there are items that don't have float/wear.
For example, this protobuff: 657596FDE081DC647DE66145654D6355660DE6E5E5E5691561C1D44731

Is this a steam limitation(not sending the float) or something wrong?
I noticed that this tends to happen on freshly acquired items(trade offers) after the 7-day hold

[Dr. McKay]

On 3/19/2026 at 10:42 AM, Alberto said:

Hello,

I'm using a local decoder + your solution introduced on 3.3, but there are items that don't have float/wear.
For example, this protobuff: 657596FDE081DC647DE66145654D6355660DE6E5E5E5691561C1D44731

Is this a steam limitation(not sending the float) or something wrong?
I noticed that this tends to happen on freshly acquired items(trade offers) after the 7-day hold

That embedded inspect link simply doesn't have a wear value in it.