The single most expensive hat trade in Team Fortress 2's history went down this week, with one player exchanging goods worth over 10,000 of the game's crate keys (around $1.80 each) for an unusual Arcana Crone's Dome, the characteristics of which make it the only one in existence. It's a witch's hat with some Halloween effects, basically, and the trade was first spotted by PyroJoe on X (formerly Twitter), who called it "the biggest singular unusual TF2 Hat trade" in the game's history.
The hat-fancier is a player called Gummy from Singapore, who exchanged various items (including a lesser Crone's Dome) that were worth approximately 10,000 keys when taken as a bundle. PyroJoe told PCG that this is now the single most expensive hat trade in TF2 history, though not the biggest trade overall.
"It's roughly the equivalent of $18,000, pricing keys at $1.80 which is the standard pricing from third party marketplaces such as Marketplace.tf," said PyroJoe. "This is also the most expensive hat sale ever now! There have been other more expensive trades made but generally speaking they've been for Misc items (items that can be worn ALONGSIDE hats so you are able to combine effects)."
It represents a huge leap in value for the hat either way, and PyroJoe can't quite seem to believe the numbers. "The last time [this hat] sold it was for 2900 keys, which at the time was also insane," said PyroJoe. "Obviously that's like 3/10 of what it's worth now though." He further opines it shouldn't have reached any more than 8,000 to 9,000 keys, which would have been a relative snip at around $14,000 to $16,000 worth of hat.
The crone's dome was first added to TF2 in 2012 as part of the Spectral Halloween special and the community-made Night of the Living Update 2. Its value is a reflection of that age and rarity, with its rarer variants only ever being available in extremely limited quantities. This exact variant's characteristics are:
- Level 1 Hat
- Custom Name: Wizu
- Effect: Arcana
- Origin: Found in Crate
- Paint: An Extraordinary Abundance of Tinge
The big question is why this is so valuable. The price comes down to rarity within rarity within rarity. "It's an unusual variant of [the Crone's Dome] which means it has an accompanying effect," says PyroJoe (whose YouTube channel is an absolute treasure-trove of TF2-related content). "The 'Arcana' effect was released way back in 2013, and only unboxable for the Halloween period of 2013. So to have it on the Crone's Dome hat essentially means it's one of a kind and will not ever be unboxed again due to it being such an old, desired effect."
The price in this case therefore reflects not just rarity but that within TF2 this is a unique item that will never be replicated. "The Crone's Dome is a high tier hat and Arcana is a limited, God-tier effect but the pricing is mostly down to the buyer being a collector," explains PyroJoe. "The owner of these kinda hats can just list them at any wild price and wait for someone with the appropriate funds to purchase it. An item that rare is essentially worth as much as someone is willing to pay!"
I suppose this is the case in pretty much every collector's market there is: the true one-offs are where the real money lies. Someone will one day write an amazing book about the economy in TF2, which is where many of the current implementations of skins and microtransactions were first popularized in western games. Back in 2013 Gabe Newell gave a talk during which he revealed one player had made over $500,000 trading, and the volume of cash involved was so great that PayPal thought nefarious stuff was going on:
"The first two weeks that we did this we actually broke Paypal," said Newell at the time, "because they didn't have—I don't know what they're worried about, maybe drug dealing—they're, 'like nothing generates cash to our userbase other than selling drugs'. We actually had to work something out with them and said "no ... they're making hats.'"
Team Fortress 2 has had ups and downs for sure, including its own equivalent of a stock market crash in 2019 thanks to a glitch causing an influx of rare items, though Valve eventually got a handle on this by implementing new rules (and, in typical Valve fashion, letting every player trade just one of the bugged items).
The game's development itself is now community-led, with Valve maintaining TF2 but the update strategy revolving around community content since 2017, and it remains hugely popular, with 115,000 average concurrent players in December. Even in TF2's pomp a trade worth around $18,000 would have been extraordinary: 17 years (!) after launch it's jaw-dropping. I hope Gummy enjoys rocking their special Crone's Dome. Me? My Pyro's sticking with the best hat in the game until it's all over.
