Building Trust in Digital Economies: Inside the Rise of Tradeit
Under30CEO had a chat with Jimi Gecelter, Co-founder of Tradeit, about transforming an in-game trading scenario that was risky and fragmented into a trusted global marketplace for virtual assets.
While gaming, which is considered a virtual world, gamers were in fact gambling with their time and money in real life. These gamers got scammed, had to wait for their trades to be processed, and the pricing was often ambiguous, which made the whole thing feel very unprofessional as compared to modern e-commerce. These were the problems that Jimi Gecelter, along with his co-founder, Shai Gecelter, solved by the creation of Tradeit, a bot-powered marketplace for in-game items.
The narrative of Tradeit is the transition from establishing the industry’s most secure trading systems to creating partnerships with esports giants like Vitality and BLAST Premier, and it is a story full of trust, accuracy, and success.
1. The Genesis and Company Vision
Q: Could you share the founding story of Tradeit? What was the first problem that you and your co-founder, Shai Gecelter, were trying to solve in the gaming world, particularly in the area of in-game virtual assets?
A: The reason for our launching Tradeit was the feeling that trading in-game items was quite risky, slow, and confusing. Payers either got themselves in the middle of the manual swaps with strangers or used some poorly designed sites that didn’t help them trust the process. We wanted to know: What would a safe, instant, and reasonably priced experience be like? In other words, buyer protection in the real sense, instant payouts, and transparent pricing. The mission from the very first day was just to make trading with virtual items as safe and easy as buying from any other known online marketplace.
Q: Tradeit has become a market leader in the in-game skins and items trading. How has the company’s vision changed from the initial days to where it is now?
A: At the beginning, doing fast and safe CS trades was the only meaning of success. Now, however, it stands for creating the most reliable liquidity platform for digital goods, interconnected games, and payment methods across different locations. We are still highly concerned about safety and speed. Still, we now think on a much larger scale: multi-game liquidity, fraud prevention at the highest level, and long-term relationships with the esports industry, for example, our collaboration with Vitality and Faceit.
2. The Business Model and Industry
Q: Tradeit is described as a “bot-enabled in-game items marketplace and trading platform.” Can you provide a layman’s description of Tradeit’s technology and business model for those unfamiliar with these terms?
A: What we do is very much like the stock market, but instead of trading stocks, it’s skins. To keep everything moving as quickly and safely as possible, we run programs (“bots”) that use secure automated accounts to hold assets and execute stock trades immediately. Players can:
- Sell quickly for real money at a transparent price.
- Trade with complete protection and great speed.
Q: It is well known that there will always be significant changes in the in-game trading environment. How does Tradeit respond to substantial changes like the introduction of the Trade Protected feature in Counter-Strike 2, and what are your thoughts about always being a step ahead in such an unstable environment?
A: Changing is always in our strategy. To change is to shift the rules of the game, and, as such, our platform should be thought of more as a layer of abstraction on top of game mechanics than as an entity that connects to particular rule sets. Methodically, we analyze the changes in the following ways:
- We practically model the effects (risk, tariffs, liquidity).
- We regulate flows and pricing frameworks to ensure we remain compliant with the new rules.
- We inform users extensively so that they understand what is different and why.
Q: The public could easily tell your collaborations with major esports organizations such as BLAST Premier and Team Vitality. How necessary are these alliances for your company, and what is the scheme behind them?
A: Trust is a process. Leading partners put our product to the test, challenge us on trustworthiness, and help us reach out to players at their level. The scheme is long-term: to energize the competitive world, to attract users with the notion of safe trading, and to align our brand with good sportsmanship and community values rather than with simple logo placement.
The collaborations between us and these companies should be interpreted as much more than just sponsorships; they’re an acknowledgment of Tradeit’s status as a key player in esports infrastructure.
3. User, Community, and Broader Trends
Q: Security is an essential aspect of your industry. What actions does Tradeit take to counter modern threats, such as AI-powered impersonation and highly sophisticated fraud attempts?
A: Our methods revolve around a combination of behavioral models with rigorous controls:
- Methods such as device fingerprinting, velocity limits, and anomaly scoring;
- Step-up verification on high-risk actions.
- Real-time sanctions and AML screens on high-value payments and cashouts;
- Human-in-the-loop reviews for edge cases;
- And simple user communication (scam playbooks, impersonation red flags).
Philosophy: always assume that the attackers change their tactics every week; therefore, we should counter them with new measures faster than that.
Q: Tradeit has been an essential part of the female esports journey, including the FE Masters tournaments. What has made this your company’s top priority, and what is your view of female esports in the future?
A: It’s both the company’s principles and business. Principles: A good ecosystem is inclusive. Business: You cannot be a market leader and overlook half of the talent pool at the same time.
Our sponsorships and projects give women the spotlight, and we do it for the long run — exposure today means more role models tomorrow. There will be bigger prize pools, more org investment, and better pipelines from grassroots to pro sooner or later.
Q: The metaverses and blockchain technology have radically changed virtual economies based on in-game items. What do you think will happen to in-game economies, and how is Tradeit preparing for a metaverse world?
A: While ownership will become more and more digitized, utility is still more critical than buzzwords (as in the case of NFTs). Regardless of whether the items are on a database or on blockchain, players will want three things: liquidity, safety, and portability.
We see our role as the reliable rails for compliance, pricing, payouts, and fraud prevention. We are tech-neutral; if a game’s economy can bring real utility and user value, we will be there to facilitate it.
4. Leadership and the Future
Q: What sorts of challenges have you encountered as a leader in this industry, and in what ways have you counteracted them?
A: I can think of three main challenges:
- Changes in policies and platforms: the essence of our work is to change the culture that treats change as a brief period of hard work rather than a crisis.
- Payments and risk: we took measures to control money flows by selecting multiple service providers, strengthened AML/KYC for high-value transactions, and decided to establish our own risk department early.
- Fraud waves: we complemented our fraud detection capabilities with new models, tools, and manual QA.
The takeaway: be very precise in your measuring, talk more than necessary, and stay calm.
Q: Looking forward, what will be the following significant milestones or goals for Tradeit? Will there be new games, features, or business ventures that you are enthusiastic about?
A:
- More volume and better prices for CS2, Rust, TF2, and Dota 2.
- Supplier tools (analytics, bulk ops, better market-making).
- Mobile experience with safer, quicker trading.
- More buyer protection and easier dispute flows.
- Carefully selecting new games for support where economies are stable and rules are clear.
We are also working on features that will allow users to transfer value from one title to another in a simple, secure way without compromising safety or compliance.
Q: What advice would you give to the entrepreneurs and the young leaders who are eager to leave their imprint in the gaming or tech industries?
A:
- Identify and fix an annoying, unglamorous problem that nobody else is solving, and build trust step by step through your actions.
- Market, measure, iterate—decide; data, not opinion, is king.
- Think ahead of risk from the first day (fraud, payments, policy). Retro-fitting is painful.
- Choose great partners—team, legal, investors, and community.
- Think long-term; reputation grows faster than you can use a growth hack (though growth hacking is a nice tool).
- Be madly in love with the area you operate in; if you do not really care about the product, players, and community, you will be crushed by the tough days. Passion provides energy and attracts wonderful people to your mission (I still play CS2 whenever I can).
- Last but not least is the concept that I call CPR: Consistency, Persistence, and Resiliency. Success without those traits is like going uphill in a battle.
