Terms of use

1. Who can use this site

You must be at least 18 years old to open an account, hold coins, buy, or sell. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up and will refuse an account that does not meet this.

If we find out that an account holder is under 18, we will close the account, stop any trades in progress and return the remaining balance to the person who paid it in. We may refuse to open an account again for the same email address.

You are responsible for the payment method you use. If it is not yours to use, do not use it here.

2. Coins are not money

Coins are a balance on this site, used to pay for items. They are not a currency, they earn nothing, and they are not a deposit. Coins bought with a card cannot be withdrawn for a holding period; coins earned from a sale can be withdrawn once the sale is complete.

3. Escrow and delivery

When you buy, your coins are held rather than paid to the seller. They are released when you confirm the item arrived, or automatically after the confirmation window if you do not respond. If the item does not arrive, open a dispute before that window closes and the coins stay held while it is reviewed.

Some listings are delivered by us rather than by the seller. On those, we hand the item to the account you gave at checkout. Check it — an item delivered to the wrong account cannot be recovered.

4. Fees

Sellers pay a fee on the sale price. Buyers pay a delivery fee on listings we deliver. Both are shown before you commit and are fixed at that moment — a later change to our rates does not affect an order already placed.

5. Chargebacks, and the part of a sale we hold back

A card payment can be reversed by the cardholder’s bank months after it was made. When that happens the money leaves us whether or not the item was delivered, so these are the rules about who carries that risk, and they apply to everybody.

If a deposit you made is reversed, the coins it paid for are removed. If you have already spent them, your balance can go negative, and we may hold withdrawals and suspend the account until it is settled. Disputing a deposit with your bank instead of contacting us is grounds for closing the account — not because the dispute is illegitimate, but because we cannot investigate something we are only told about by a card network.

If you sell, part of each sale stays with us for a period before it becomes withdrawable. How much and for how long depends on your trading record: an established seller holds back less than a new one, and a seller with a settled record across many different counterparties holds back nothing at all. The amount and its release date are shown on your sales.

That holdback exists for the harms that surface after a trade looks finished — an item traced as duplicated, a game account recovered by its original owner, a trade reversed by the game. If one of those lands on a buyer you sold to, we may take it from the holdback. We take what the claim actually costs and no more, and what is left still becomes yours on its original date.

We do not take a holdback for our own fees, and it is not a penalty. If nothing goes wrong it is paid out in full.

6. What we are, in money terms

We hold a balance for you and we hold the money for a trade while it is in progress. We are not a bank, we are not a money transmitter, and coins are not a stored-value instrument you can send to another person. There is no way to move coins from your account to somebody else’s except by buying something they are selling, and that is deliberate.

Your balance earns nothing, is not insured, and is not a deposit. It is a record of what we owe you against purchases on this site and against a withdrawal you ask for.

Card payments and payouts are processed by Stripe, under their terms as well as ours.

7. What we will close an account for

• Being under 18.
• Paying with a card that is not yours.
• Selling items you do not have, or do not own.
• Buying from yourself through a second account, which is how a stolen card is turned into a withdrawal.
• Taking buyers off this site to avoid fees — which also takes them outside escrow, where nothing protects them.
• Using another person’s account, or lending yours.

Closing an account does not cancel what it already owes, and it does not release money held against an open dispute.

8. Closing your own account

You can close your account at any time from your account page, once you have no orders in progress and no balance left. What we erase and what we keep is set out in the privacy policy.

9. What we are not

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the publishers of any game whose items are traded here. Trading items may be against those games’ own rules, and what happens to your game account is between you and them.

Items exist inside somebody else’s game. If a publisher removes an item, changes it, or bans an account, we cannot undo it and we do not compensate for it.

10. Your data

What we collect and what you can ask us to do about it is in the privacy policy, which is part of these terms.

11. Governing law

[Not yet set.] This clause is deliberately blank rather than guessed at. Which law applies changes what several sections above have to say, and a wrong answer here is worse than an absent one.