We can only hope that the current largest and oldest markets will retire with honor. Articles from Journal of Medical Internet Research are provided here courtesy of JMIR Publications Inc. Note that data for 2020 only included data from January to March; price per gram is in US $.
In some cases, established sellers on closed-down markets are welcomed onto new markets as digital “refugees” and have joining fees waived. Last week, one of the dark web’s most prominent drug marketplaces—Archetyp—was shut down in an international, multi-agency law enforcement operation following years of investigations. This particular marketplace surfaced in the middle of 2017 and had remained active ever since. However, it’s worth noting the website does not contain multisim like other marketplaces do and don’t force vendor PGP, but there is 2FA to help you stay protected while buying online. Transactions within these marketplaces typically leverage cryptocurrencies—most commonly Monero, Bitcoin, and privacy-centric digital currencies developed specifically to enhance transaction anonymity. Monero, in particular, has become the preferred cryptocurrency on the dark web in 2025 due to its advanced privacy mechanisms, which obscure transaction histories and wallet balances from public view.
By 2025, several platforms have emerged as leaders in this space, leveraging advanced encryption, decentralized systems, and user-friendly interfaces to ensure seamless transactions. However, if we’re being honest, the majority of activity on darknet markets involves illegal or heavily regulated items. A 2020 study found that almost 57% of sites on the Tor network hosted some form of illegal content. The market facilitates trades in stolen credit card data, hacked bank accounts, and services to facilitate the laundering of cryptocurrency. It has a search option to let you find local and international products and services on the dark web.
Another one of the biggest Darknet marketplaces out there, Berlusconi Market prides itself on over 12,224 listings, with only 6,400 of them being drug-related, meaning there are thousands of listings here for you to explore. If you’re looking for a vast selection to explore, but not just for drugs, Point, originally titled Tochka Market, is easily the best place to go. At the time of writing, there are over 19,480 individual listings on the website, making it one of the largest by a landslide. Our modification of the semantic comparison model will generate comparable word embeddings for opioid jargon words in legitimate documents (ie, benign corpora embedding) and in underground corpora (ie, underground corpora embedding). We output the top 100 proper nouns in the underground corpora in our implementation, whose embeddings showed the closest cosine distance to the known opioid keywords. Data set summary of marketplaces and forums that were collected for this study.
What Do Darknet Drug Markets Look Like In 2023?
Incognito Market runs 20,000+ listings and $2.8 million monthly trades with BTC and XMR, holding a 5% market stake. Its 10,000+ users and 800+ vendors rely on 2FA and escrow security for private cryptocurrency trading. One of the key features of these markets is their use of Tor networks, which anonymize user activity by routing traffic through multiple nodes. This ensures that transactions remain untraceable, providing a layer of security unmatched by traditional online platforms.
Does The CIA Have An Onion Site?
With nearly 292,000 members, RuTor is the largest DNM on the Russian-speaking dark web. The forum statistics panel also notes how the forum hosts over 2.2 million user posts scattered across 37,310 unique topics to date. “Bitcoin is expensive and highly volatile, so $100 today might be $60 tomorrow (or $160),” Terence told me.
‘It’s Happening Everywhere’: 1 In 3 ICE Detainees Held In Overcrowded Facilities, Data Show
Just like in the old days of the internet, the dark web maintains numerous indexes of sites, like The Hidden Wiki. Unlike Ahmia and Haystak, however, DuckDuckGo doesn’t search .onion sites. Use it to search the normal internet from the privacy of your Tor Browser. Torch is one of the oldest and most popular onion search engines on the dark web, serving over 80,000 requests per day. Torch is funded primarily through advertising—purchased in BTC, of course—which is why you’ll find the front page blanketed with old-school banner ads of dubious origins.
Malware Sales
It collects data from the public Tor network and archives historical data of the Tor ecosystem. In most cases, whistleblowers have sensitive information about the government or a company. They can be easily traced and even prosecuted if they share the information on the surface web.
Table Of Contents
The only way to access the dark web is by using the correct browser and knowing the URLs of the pages you want to visit. Scroll on to learn more about dark web links (also called Tor links or onion sites), get the right links for some of the best Tor sites, and find out how to visit them safely. These trends are likely to continue, as online marketplaces become more sophisticated and more people turn to e-commerce outlets to score their illegal products.
Treasury International Capital (TIC) System
This trend will likely accelerate, with future coordination tools mirroring the usability of legitimate apps like Slack or Discord, but weaponised for fraud, ransomware, and data theft. Authorities from six nations—Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and the US—joined forces under Operation Deep Sentinel to dismantle Archetyp Market. The coordinated law enforcement actions took place between June 11 and 13, involving roughly 300 officers. German police spearheaded the effort, supported by Europol and Eurojust. The infrastructure was dismantled in the Netherlands, while arrests spanned Germany, Spain, and Sweden, including the suspected administrator—a 30-year-old German national arrested in Barcelona. Other key figures, such as moderators and top vendors, were also apprehended.
Stigma And Inequality: The Hidden Harms Faced By UK Cannabis Patients
For example, you shouldn’t pirate copyrighted material, engage in terrorism, or share illegal pornography. Simply put, accessing and browsing the dark web is perfectly legal. For example, it maintains your privacy and enables you to access untraceable content and services. Furthermore, it’s critical to understand that Whonix is not a stand-alone browser. It is a component of Whonix, an operating system that functions as a whole inside a virtual computer.
Encrypted Communication Tools
Of course, the promise of secrecy and unfiltered access might lure you in, but those same features are what make the environment so risky. Some vendors offer services to help people “clean” illegally obtained funds using cryptocurrency and fake transactions. They mix and transfer funds through various privacy wallets and escrow services to hide the original source and make the illicit transactions harder to trace. The dark web itself is not illegal, but it’s largely connected with unscrupulous and illegal operations. It is used by many for buying or selling items that are prohibited on the regular internet, like fake IDs, illegal drugs, and stolen data. Unlike regular e-commerce sites, markets on the dark web often deal with illegal or highly restricted goods and services, such as fake documents, hard drugs, and hacking services.
- Founded around 1999 by activists in Seattle, it has since grown to over six million users worldwide.
- The crawler was implemented in Python and used the Selenium module to launch browsers and to send crawling requests 24.
- Further market diversification occurred in 2015, as did further developments around escrow and decentralization.
- “Waste your resources on seizing petty websites because they know the use of darknet services is ever growing,” another user wrote.
Market lists, often updated regularly, provide users with direct access to active onion URLs, reducing the risk of phishing or scams. These lists are curated based on user feedback, uptime, and overall reputation, making them indispensable tools for navigating the darknet landscape. Additionally, the integration of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies ensures seamless and private transactions, further enhancing the user experience. The leading markets offer a wide range of substances, from pharmaceuticals to recreational drugs, catering to various preferences.
Sure, you might come across listings for legit products like handcrafted jewelry or digital art, but those are few and far between. Launched after the takedown of AlphaBay in 2021, Abacus Market has rapidly risen to prominence. It features over 40,000 listings including narcotics, counterfeit items, hacking tools, and stolen data.
We deliver contextualized, actionable intelligence through our dedicated platform or API integration, ensuring that you can respond effectively to darknet threats. With over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity and marketing, Ben has held leadership roles at companies like Check Point, Cognyte, Cylus, and Ionix. To surf on the dark web safely, use the Tor Browser, stick to verified dark web link, and employ strong cybersecurity practices like VPNs and antivirus software. Monero’s privacy beats Bitcoin’s traceability—BTC usage dropped 40% since 2023 due to tracking risks. Use Tor Browser from torproject.org for safe onion routing—update regularly.
