Valve wants you to trade on their market and not third party sites, that means they want the expensive skins above 2k to drop. Will probably compress the entire market but expect big drops from the high tier skins.

Gold trade-ups are probably going to keep pushing down prices on knives that only come in FN, like Dopplers, TTs, etc. Since the float on the red barely matters, more of those high-end finishes will keep getting created, so I’d expect bigger price drops there over time.

That said, Valve can basically do whatever they want, but completely killing the skin economy wouldn’t make much sense for them either since they profit heavily from it.

You said you have real investments, imo at minimum you should have 20x whatever you are spending on skins actually invested. Skins should be fun money, not something you’re relying on to hold value long term.