The history of darknet markets: how every major market ended, Silk Road to Nexus

Every major darknet market that closed, 2011 to 2026

The table lists 60 markets in the order they closed, the first in April 2012 and the latest in the autumn of 2026, with how each one ended. Opening and closing months are the first and last sales recorded in the EU drugs agency's dataset of darknet market lifetimes, which covers markets selling drugs up to the end of 2023. Where police or the operators announced a closing date, that date is used instead, and markets after 2023 are dated from the sources in their own entries. A market's name links to its entry further down.

The table leaves out card shops and credential markets such as Genesis, Joker's Stash and BidenCash, which sold stolen logins and card data rather than running drug escrow, and forums such as Dread, which are where markets are discussed, not where anything is sold. The police operations behind the "seized" rows, with arrests and sentences, are in the darknet market takedowns timeline. Markets still running in 2026 are on the list of best darknet markets.

Before Silk Road: the first drug deal online, and the first market on Tor

The first online drug deal predates the web. John Markoff's history of the early internet, quoted by the Guardian, says that "in 1971 or 1972" Stanford students used ARPANET accounts to arrange a sale of marijuana with students at MIT. The network arranged the deal; the cannabis changed hands in person. Through the 1990s the trade's knowledge lived on forums: The Hive, a forum on the chemistry of psychoactive drugs started in 1997, had more than 8,500 active users before it went offline at the end of 2004. It sold nothing. It is where the vocabulary and the habits of anonymous drug talk were built.

The Farmer's Market

Opened

About 2007 by email; on Tor from 2010

Closed

April 2012

Ended

Seized in Operation Adam Bomb

The first drug market on Tor took PayPal. The Farmer's Market, first called Adamflowers, sold LSD, MDMA, ketamine, fentanyl and cannabis to about 3,000 customers in 34 countries, and between January 2007 and October 2009 it processed 5,256 orders worth about $1,041,244. It moved onto Tor in 2010, but payments still went through Western Union, PayPal, Pecunix and I-Golder. A two-year DEA investigation with Dutch police ended in eight arrests in April 2012, in the Netherlands, Colombia and the US. The lead defendant, Marc Willems, was sentenced to 121 months in December 2014. Tor hid the site, but the payments ran through companies that keep records.

Silk Road and its first rivals, 2011 to 2013

Silk Road was the first market that paired Tor with bitcoin, and most markets since have kept the same three parts: a hidden site, a coin, and the market holding the money in escrow until the buyer confirms delivery. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon call it "the first successful online anonymous marketplace." Its rivals in these years showed the ending that would become the most common: the operators taking the escrow, sometimes blaming a hack, as Sheep's did.

Silk Road

Opened

February 2011

Closed

2 October 2013

Ended

Seized by the FBI; operator arrested

Size

146,946 buyer and 3,877 vendor accounts

The FBI's complaint dates Silk Road to January 2011 and counts, from February 2011 to July 2013, about 1,229,465 completed transactions between 146,946 buyer accounts and 3,877 vendor accounts. Gawker's article of 1 June 2011, which made it famous, counted 340 items and described a feedback system "familiar to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay." Ross Ulbricht, "Dread Pirate Roberts", was arrested in a San Francisco library on 1 October 2013 and the site was seized the next day. He was sentenced to life in May 2015, and pardoned on 21 January 2025. The two different dollar totals for Silk Road are explained under the biggest markets by each measure.

Black Market Reloaded

Opened

June 2011

Closed

December 2013

Ended

Closed by its operator

Black Market Reloaded was founded in June 2011, and it permitted gun sales, which Silk Road allowed only briefly. In October 2013 its operator, backopy, shut it after a server administrator leaked the source code, then brought it back the next day. With Silk Road gone it became the largest market, with nearly 7,000 listings, and in December it closed for good. Backopy's stated reason was "Tor can't support any site to be too big." A big theft that month helped push him to it; buying stopped on 2 December and the market was fully shut by 23 December. Three weeks of notice was more than most of its rivals gave.

Atlantis

Opened

March 2013

Closed

September 2013

Ended

Exit scam

Atlantis marketed itself in the open. It ran a cartoon ad on YouTube until YouTube took it down, and kept a Facebook page and took Litecoin as well as bitcoin. On 20 September 2013 it closed, citing "security reasons outside our control", and gave users a week to withdraw. A forum moderator then told The Verge the closure "was essentially a business decision" and that withdrawals were failing. It closed eleven days before Ulbricht's arrest, which later made the closure look prescient, but by then its withdrawals were already failing.

Sheep Marketplace

Opened

February 2013

Closed

November 2013

Ended

Exit scam

Sheep was the biggest exit scam of 2013, and one of the few a court later sorted out. Its administrators blamed a vendor for "a catastrophic theft of 5,400 bitcoins"; users accused the owners of taking almost 100,000. Europol later wrote that Sheep "folded in November 2013 along with over EUR 36 million of members' Bitcoins." A Czech regional court found that its operator, Tomáš Jiříkovský, brokered at least 11,263 drug sales and on 1 December 2013 moved 840.70 bitcoin out of 5,438 customer addresses, and sentenced him to nine years. The 840.70 bitcoin is what the court could prove; the larger figures are the administrators', the users' and Europol's estimates.

After Silk Road, 2013 to 2015: copies, thefts and Operation Onymous

Silk Road's seizure did not shrink the trade; it scattered it. The Carnegie Mellon team, scraping 35 markets in these years, found sales generally stable at around $300,000 to $500,000 a day, with the top 1% of vendors making 51.5% of them. The markets changed underneath that steady number almost every month. On 5 and 6 November 2014, Operation Onymous took down more than 410 hidden services, and the two biggest markets that survived it were gone within a year by their own hand.

Silk Road 2.0

Opened

6 November 2013

Closed

6 November 2014

Ended

Seized in Operation Onymous

Size

About $8 million in sales a month

Silk Road 2.0 launched about five weeks after the original was shut down. By September 2014 it was making at least $8 million a month in sales with about 150,000 active users, and it had over 13,000 drug listings in October. In February 2014 it lost its whole escrow: 4,474.26 bitcoin, worth about $2.7 million, which its administrator said a vendor took through a bitcoin flaw called transaction malleability. Its operator, Blake Benthall, "Defcon", was arrested in San Francisco the day before Onymous. A year to the day after it opened, it was seized.

Utopia

Opened

3 February 2014

Closed

11 February 2014

Ended

Seized by Dutch and German police

Utopia is the shortest life in this history. It had been open eight days when Dutch and German police shut it down on 11 February 2014, in an operation called Commodore; they arrested five people and seized 900 bitcoin. It already had more than 13,000 listings. Two of the Dutch suspects had also been involved with Black Market Reloaded.

Pandora

Opened

October 2013

Closed

November 2014

Ended

Hacked, then seized in Operation Onymous

Pandora is on the Justice Department's list of sites seized in Onymous, but by then there was little left to seize. Gwern Branwen's dataset of market closures records two hacks, the second of which lost half the market's central escrow, and notes that Pandora "had already turned scammer" before the police arrived.

Evolution

Opened

January 2014

Closed

March 2015

Ended

Exit scam

Size

Nearly 20,000 drug listings

Evolution was one of the two biggest markets after Onymous, and then it took the escrow. Withdrawals stopped over a weekend in mid-March 2015; by the Tuesday the market and its forum were gone, with nearly 20,000 drug listings, and a forum moderator said the owners, Verto and Kimble, had admitted it. The Guardian put the loss at over $12 million; Europol at over €11 million. Evolution had advertised multisig escrow, which would have stopped the theft, but its version "did not function as intended, and was rarely used." Buyers who had paid through ordinary escrow, which was almost all of them, lost everything in it.

Agora

Opened

December 2013

Closed

September 2015

Ended

Closed by its operators, withdrawals open

Agora closed with its users' money still withdrawable, which is rare for a market that size. It was the largest market in a 2015 count, with 25,440 products. In August 2015 it announced it would go offline, citing suspicious activity against its Tor servers, and a paper published that month on identifying hidden services from their traffic. It had banned guns in July 2015, and it let users withdraw before it went dark. It said it would come back, and never did.

Abraxas

Opened

December 2014

Closed

November 2015

Ended

Exit scam

Abraxas opened in December 2014, three months before Evolution's exit scam, and outlived it by eight months. It went down on 5 November 2015, and months later its wallet may have been drained. It disappeared the same week as Middle Earth, two months after Agora closed.

Middle Earth

Opened

June 2014

Closed

November 2015

Ended

Exit scam

Middle Earth followed the script that later exit scams copied step by step. Withdrawal problems were reported in late October 2015, the site went down for "maintenance" around 4 November, and by 6 November the administrators were moving the coins.

Nucleus

Opened

October 2014

Closed

April 2016

Ended

Vanished without a statement

Nucleus had 13,922 products in 2015, and Europol named it, with Agora and Outlaw, as one of the highest-priority markets for EU police after Onymous. In April 2016 it stopped answering, and its administrators made no announcement. Europol's next report could not say whether it was an exit scam, because customers' funds were still sitting in the market's wallet. The EU drugs agency's dataset later recorded it as an exit scam.

TheRealDeal

Opened

April 2015

Closed

October 2016

Ended

Unknown

TheRealDeal sold hacking tools, not drugs, and was one of the first markets to make multisig the only way to pay. Its listings included an iCloud exploit for $17,000, and every payment was a 2-of-3 multisignature transaction, so the market could not take the money on its own. Several of its staff were arrested, and it went down, came back, and then stopped for good in October 2016.

Outlaw Market

Opened

December 2013

Closed

May 2017

Ended

A hack, by its staff's account

Outlaw ran for three and a half years, which made it one of the oldest markets alive in 2017. Its former staff insist it ended in a genuine hack rather than an exit scam, and the EU drugs agency lists the reason as unknown. Europol had it on the same priority list as Agora and Nucleus in 2015.

AlphaBay, Hansa and the forums, 2015 to 2019

This is the period when one market got big enough to rival Silk Road several times over, and the police showed they could run a market themselves. It is also when the trade's public discussion moved off the open web. Reddit banned r/DarkNetMarkets, with almost 160,000 readers, on 21 March 2018. Dread, a Reddit-style forum on Tor run by HugBunter, had opened a month earlier, and it is still where markets announce themselves. DeepDotWeb, the news and link site that took more than 8,150 bitcoin in kickbacks for referring buyers to markets, was seized in May 2019.

AlphaBay

Opened

December 2014

Closed

July 2017, and again February 2023

Ended

Seized in Operation Bayonet; relaunch recorded as an exit scam

Size

Over 250,000 drug and chemical listings

AlphaBay was the biggest market of its time and the first big one to take Monero. The Justice Department counted over 250,000 listings for drugs and toxic chemicals and over 100,000 for stolen IDs, counterfeit goods, malware and guns, paid in bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum. Monero arrived on 1 September 2016, which AlphaBay put down to the coin's "security features." Its founder, Alexandre Cazes, was arrested in Thailand on 5 July 2017 and died in custody a week later; its servers were seized in Canada and the Netherlands.

It came back. On 6 August 2021 someone using the name DeSnake relaunched it on I2P with a Tor mirror, and it took only Monero and had just under 500 listings a few weeks in, against more than 350,000 at the 2017 peak. Chainalysis says the relaunched market ran until February 2023, and does not put its end down to the police. The EU drugs agency's dataset records its last sale in November 2022 and calls the ending an exit scam.

Hansa

Opened

August 2015

Closed

20 July 2017

Ended

Taken over and run by Dutch police, then shut

At its height Hansa's 3,600 dealers had more than 24,000 drug listings. Dutch police took it over on 20 June 2017 and ran it for a month; when AlphaBay closed, new members rose eight-fold, straight into the police's hands. Its two administrators, aged 30 and 31, were arrested in Germany. How the takeover worked, week by week, is in the takedowns timeline's account of the Hansa honeypot.

Dream Market

Opened

November 2013

Closed

April 2019

Ended

Closed by its operators

Dream ran for about five and a half years, longer than any other English-language market of its time. The DEA dates it to around November 2013, and after AlphaBay and Hansa closed it became the default. It shut in April 2019, and a statement attributed to its administrator blamed constant DDoS attacks from people trying to extort the market. One of its senior moderators, Gal Vallerius, "OxyMonster", was identified from his laptop at Atlanta airport in August 2017 and sentenced to 240 months in October 2018.

Samsara

Opened

July 2019

Closed

November 2019

Ended

Exit scam

Samsara was opened by a former Dream moderator on Dream's own source code, and it collected the users who wanted Dream to continue. It lasted four months and ended in an exit scam.

Wall Street Market

Opened

October 2016

Closed

April 2019

Ended

Seized in the middle of its own exit scam

Size

1.15 million customer accounts, 5,400 vendors

Germany's BKA counted more than 63,000 listings, more than 1,150,000 customer accounts and more than 5,400 sellers, paid in bitcoin and Monero with a commission of 2 to 6%. Vendors could not withdraw from about 16 April 2019; US investigators say the three German administrators were taking about $11 million from escrow and user accounts when they were arrested on 23 and 24 April. Its servers later fed the 179 vendor arrests of Operation DisrupTor.

Valhalla (Silkkitie)

Opened

2013

Closed

Early 2019

Ended

Seized by Finnish Customs

Silkkitie, Finnish for Silk Road, was a Finnish-language market that also ran under the name Valhalla. Finnish Customs says the site had been on Tor since 2013 and that it seized the web server early in 2019, with "a significant bitcoin seizure." The seizure was announced on 3 May 2019, the same day as Wall Street Market's.

Tochka (Point)

Opened

January 2015

Closed

November 2019

Ended

Exit scam

Tochka, also called Point, ran for almost five years, nearly twice as long as AlphaBay, with little press. The EU drugs agency dates it from January 2015 to 28 November 2019 and records an exit scam. It went down in the same November as Cryptonia, Samsara and Berlusconi: four markets in one month.

Nightmare

Opened

April 2019

Closed

July 2019

Ended

Exit scam

Nightmare opened in April 2019, the month Dream and Wall Street Market both went, and lasted about three months. Chainalysis says it closed in July 2019 and was not shut down by police. In November the dead site was hacked and defaced.

Berlusconi Market

Opened

November 2016

Closed

November 2019

Ended

Seized by Italy's Guardia di Finanza

Italy's financial police closed Berlusconi Market in November 2019 and arrested three administrators aged 19, 26 and 27. It had more than 100,000 listings. Il Sole 24 Ore counted 30,000 of them for drugs and 5,000 for weapons. The case grew out of an earlier Italian investigation, "Darknet.drug", in May 2019.

Cryptonia

Opened

October 2018

Closed

November 2019

Ended

Exit scam

Cryptonia went down on 14 November 2019 and was still offline three weeks later, despite an administrator promising it would return. Its administrators had said the escrow was safe and they had planned to close anyway. The EU drugs agency records it as an exit scam.

Empire, White House and the turn to Monero, 2019 to 2022

In these three years the biggest Western markets stopped trusting bitcoin and their own wallets. White House Market took only Monero, Monopoly held no buyer funds at all, and a DDoS defence called EndGame, released on 26 May 2020 by Dread and White House Market, spread across the big markets. The endings did not get kinder: the EU drugs agency records Empire as an exit scam, and four of the ten markets in this section ended that way.

Apollon

Opened

March 2018

Closed

January 2020

Ended

Exit scam

Apollon had more than 54,000 items in January 2020; from 28 January vendors were locked out of their accounts, the usual first move of an exit, because vendors are the users who notice missing money first. DarkOwl's own count was lower: it found 35,028 listings and 1,761 vendor accounts, with listings worth about $11 million in total.

Empire Market

Opened

1 February 2018

Closed

22 August 2020

Ended

Exit scam, in the EU drugs agency's record; both founders later charged

Size

About 4 million transactions, over $430 million

Empire went offline in August 2020, and its co-creator got the longest sentence of anyone behind a market that ended without a seizure. The Justice Department says it handled about four million transactions worth more than $430 million, and its indictment says the two founders ran it until about 22 August 2020. The EU drugs agency records the ending as an exit scam; the Justice Department's releases say when it ran, not how it closed. Both founders were charged in 2024. Raheim Hamilton was sentenced to 40 years on 5 October 2026, and the sentencing note covers the case.

DarkMarket

Opened

June 2019

Closed

January 2021

Ended

Seized by German police

Size

Almost 500,000 users, over €140 million

Europol called DarkMarket the world's largest market when it was seized in January 2021: almost 500,000 users, more than 2,400 sellers, over 320,000 transactions and more than 4,650 bitcoin and 12,800 Monero, worth over €140 million. Koblenz prosecutors say it started in June 2019 at the "Cyberbunker" hosting site in Traben-Trarbach, taking a commission of 4%, later 5%. Its Australian operator was arrested near the German-Danish border. By the Justice Department's figures, Hydra was far larger that year.

White House Market

Opened

August 2019

Closed

October 2021

Ended

Closed by its operators

Size

Almost 895,000 accounts, 3,450 vendors

White House Market set the security model many later markets copied. It took only Monero, refused to load with JavaScript on, and made every login decrypt a PGP message. When it retired in October 2021 it had almost 895,000 registered users, 3,450 vendors and nearly 47,500 listings, and it announced the closure in a message signed with its PGP key. One academic account says users were allowed to withdraw; another says many complained they never got coins back from open orders and disputes, and forum admins marked it a "dishonourable exit." A retirement with withdrawals open still strands whatever is in escrow on the last day.

Cannazon

Opened

March 2018

Closed

November 2021

Ended

Closed by its operators after a DDoS

Cannazon was a cannabis market that announced its retirement in a PGP-signed message on 23 November 2021, after a massive DDoS, and was offline by the 29th. It served only customers outside the US and took bitcoin or Monero.

ToRReZ

Opened

February 2020

Closed

December 2021

Ended

Closed by its operators

ToRReZ claimed more than 160,000 registered users when its administrator, MrBlonde, wrote "After 675 days…we have decided to close" in December 2021. Functions were switched off from 17 December, and it was the third big market to retire in three months, after White House Market and Cannazon.

Monopoly Market

Opened

Mid-2019

Closed

December 2021

Ended

Seized by German police

Monopoly held no buyer wallets: buyers paid vendors directly, so there was no pot for the operators to take. German investigators say it existed from mid-2019, sold only drugs, had 403 vendor accounts and more than 130,000 sales, and ran on servers in Germany and Finland. Those servers were seized in December 2021, and in May 2023 their data produced 288 vendor arrests in Operation SpecTor. Walletless design protected the money. It did nothing for the records.

Dark0de Reborn

Opened

May 2020

Closed

February 2022

Ended

Exit scam

Dark0de Reborn lasted 21 months. The EU drugs agency dates it from May 2020 to 23 February 2022 and records an exit scam. It closed six weeks before Hydra was seized, and it began a run of three Western markets that ended within three months: Dark0de, World Market and Versus.

World Market

Opened

November 2020

Closed

March 2022

Ended

Exit scam

World Market ran from November 2020 until March 2022 and ended in an exit scam. It stopped paying out about two weeks after Dark0de, so a buyer who moved from one to the other in late February could lose money twice in a month.

Versus

Opened

December 2019

Closed

May 2022

Ended

Closed by its operators after a flaw was published

Versus enforced multisig escrow, and it closed over a security hole. A hacker posted a proof of concept on Dread; the operators admitted that someone had had read-only access to a six-month-old copy of the database, and that the server's IP address may have leaked, and chose "to gracefully retire."

The Russian-language markets: RAMP, Hydra and what replaced them

The Russian-language markets are a separate history and, by money, the larger one. They grew around dead drops, called klad or zakladki: TRM Labs describes vendors leaving the drugs hidden in a city for the buyer to collect; Western markets post them. A dead drop needs someone in the buyer's city, so these markets grew as platforms for shops with local couriers, and no Western market has ever matched their turnover.

RAMP

Opened

September 2012

Closed

July 2017

Ended

Disputed

RAMP, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, was run by an administrator called Darkside from September 2012. It had about 14,000 active buyers and sellers and charged no commission; dealers paid $300 a month for a home-page spot and $1,000 a month for a Moscow "license." How it ended has two versions. A Russian Interior Ministry official told TASS in 2017 that police had taken it down that July. A Lenta.ru investigation in 2019 said Hydra killed it with DDoS attacks on RAMP's instant shops and by poaching its vendors and moderators. RAMP had also lost about $60 million of dealer deposits when the BTC-e exchange collapsed. No court record settles it.

Hydra

Opened

2015

Closed

5 April 2022

Ended

Seized by German police

Size

About $5.2 billion received; about 17 million customer accounts

Hydra was the biggest darknet market that has ever existed. The Justice Department says it received about $5.2 billion in cryptocurrency since 2015 and accounted for about 80% of all darknet market crypto transactions in 2021. Germany's BKA counted about 17 million customer accounts and more than 19,000 seller accounts, a 2020 turnover of at least €1.23 billion, and seized 543 bitcoin, about €23 million, with the German servers on 5 April 2022. The US Treasury sanctioned Hydra and the Garantex exchange the same day. In December 2024 a Moscow regional court sentenced Stanislav Moiseyev, named as the organiser, to life, and 15 others to between 8 and 23 years.

Solaris

Opened

May 2022

Closed

13 January 2023

Ended

Taken over by Kraken

Solaris opened in early May 2022, a month after Hydra fell. On 13 January 2023 its users were redirected to Kraken, which claimed control of Solaris's servers and source code. Elliptic saw no activity in Solaris's bitcoin addresses after that day; the market had made about $150 million in sales and held 20 to 25% of the Russian trade. RAMP's end may have been Hydra's doing, but Solaris is the only case where the rival announced it.

Apart from Solaris, the markets that replaced Hydra are still open in 2026, which is why they have no entries here. OMG!OMG! briefly took 65.2% of the trade after the seizure; Mega led 2023 with more than half a billion dollars in inflows; Kraken overtook it in 2024 with $737 million on-chain. The UN names Kraken, OMG, Mega and Blacksprut as the largest darknet markets of 2025, all serving mainly Russian-speaking customers. No police force has seized any of them. Russian police did detain four alleged moderators of WayAway, a forum tied to Kraken, in August 2025; the case names at least 2,932 shops on Kraken since December 2022.

Fragmentation after Hydra, 2023 to 2026

After 2022 no Western market came close to AlphaBay's or Hydra's size, and the endings came faster. The UN describes "a more fragmented landscape" since Hydra. German police seized three of the biggest Western markets in 18 months, Kingdom, Nemesis and Archetyp, and the biggest of all, Abacus, ended in an exit scam. TRM says the number of new markets launched in 2024 fell 42%.

ASAP

Opened

March 2020

Closed

July 2023

Ended

Closed by its operators

Searchlight Cyber says ASAP was the biggest market by number of listings when its administrator announced on Dread in July 2023 that it was retiring. TRM also records the closure as voluntary. Abacus was the biggest Western market for the two years after ASAP closed.

Vice City

Opened

May 2020

Closed

July 2023

Ended

Exit scam

Vice City ran from May 2020 to 27 July 2023 and ended in an exit scam, the day before ASAP's last recorded sale. ASAP announced its retirement; Vice City took the escrow.

Tor2Door

Opened

July 2020

Closed

September 2023

Ended

Exit scam

Searchlight Cyber counted about 12,000 listings and 950 vendors on Tor2Door in 2023; it went inactive that September, and with no police announcement, its operators are widely believed to have taken the funds. Its data reached the police anyway: Tor2Door is one of the four markets the 2025 Operation RapTor arrests were built on.

Kingdom Market

Opened

March 2021

Closed

December 2023

Ended

Seized by German police

The BKA says Kingdom was reachable on Tor and I2P from at least March 2021 and had more than 42,000 listings, about 3,600 of them from Germany, paid in bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero or Zcash with a 3% commission. Police took it down on 16 December 2023. Its Slovak administrator, Alan Bill, had been arrested at Newark airport the day before, and was sentenced to 200 months in May 2026.

Bohemia and Cannabia

Opened

2021

Closed

End of 2023

Ended

Exit scam; administrators arrested in 2024

Dutch police say Bohemia and its sister market Cannabia had about 82,000 listings a day and 67,000 transactions a month, with a peak month of €12 million in September 2023, and ended in an exit scam at the end of that year. One administrator was arrested at Schiphol in June 2024 and another by the Irish authorities, and about €8 million in crypto was seized. The Rotterdam court gave the Schiphol arrestee two years in December 2025. Bohemia is the proof that an exit scam does not end the police's interest.

Incognito Market

Opened

October 2020

Closed

March 2024

Ended

Exit scam, then extortion

Size

More than $105 million in drug sales, 400,000 buyer accounts

Incognito is the market whose operator threatened its own customers. Withdrawal problems began in February 2024; in March the administrator threatened to give vendor information and private messages to the police unless paid by 1 April, and then called it a joke. A case study quotes the threat to publish "557k orders and 862k crypto transaction IDs," with fees from $100 to $20,000. The Justice Department says Incognito had more than 400,000 buyer accounts and 1,800 vendors, handled more than 640,000 transactions and sold more than $105 million in drugs, and that its owner closed it by taking at least $1 million from users' deposits. Rui-Siang Lin was sentenced to 30 years in February 2026.

Nemesis Market

Opened

March 2021

Closed

20 March 2024

Ended

Seized by German police

Nemesis launched around March 2021 and at its peak had over 150,000 users, more than 1,100 vendor accounts and more than 400,000 orders. German police seized its servers in Germany and Lithuania on 20 March 2024. A year later the US Treasury named its sole administrator, Behrouz Parsarad, living in Iran. He has not been arrested.

Cypher

Opened

February 2020

Closed

April 2024

Ended

Went offline, unexplained

Searchlight Cyber counted about 10,000 listings and 500 vendors on Cypher in 2023, calls it one of the longest-running markets until it went offline, and lists it inactive since April 2024. No seizure has been announced, and no police force or analytics firm has said how it ended.

Archetyp Market

Opened

May 2020

Closed

June 2025

Ended

Seized in Operation Deep Sentinel

Size

About 612,000 accounts, 3,200 vendors

Archetyp was the longest-running Western market of its day and took only Monero. The BKA counted about 17,000 listings, 612,000 customer accounts and 3,200 vendors, and arrested its 30-year-old German administrator in Barcelona on 11 June 2025. Eurojust notes it was one of the only markets that allowed fentanyl, and had been active for over five years. The indictment in August 2026 put its turnover at about €330 million from about 2.3 million orders.

MGM Grand

Opened

April 2021

Closed

June 2025

Ended

Closed by its operators

MGM Grand warned its users to withdraw and shut down in June 2025, after four years. The University of New South Wales drug-market monitoring records it as a voluntary exit, with up to 3,597 drug listings. Of the three markets that closed in June and July 2025, it was the only one to warn its users first; Archetyp was seized and Abacus vanished.

Abacus Market

Opened

September 2021, as Alphabet Market

Closed

July 2025

Ended

Exit scam

Size

Over 70% of bitcoin sales on Western markets in 2024

Abacus held most of the Western trade when it vanished. TRM says it launched as Alphabet Market in September 2021, took over 70% of bitcoin sales on Western markets in 2024, and made nearly $100 million in bitcoin sales, or $300 to $400 million counting Monero. After Archetyp's seizure it had its best month, $6.3 million, and in early July 2025 it went offline in what TRM calls a likely exit scam by its administrator, "Vito". The UN's 2026 report treats it as an exit scam, and says it offered more than 40,000 products. No seizure has been announced.

Kerberos

Opened

September 2022

Closed

February 2026

Ended

Exit scam, in Searchlight Cyber's view

Searchlight Cyber dates Kerberos from September 2022 and wrote in March 2026 that it "is believed to have exit-scammed in February 2026." It is the first market of 2026 in this list, and it ended the way the year's two bigger closures would.

Dark Matter

Opened

September 2022

Closed

Between mid-September and 1 October 2026

Ended

Stopped paying out

Size

Up to 9,260 drug listings

Dark Matter was the second-biggest market by drug listings in early 2026. In January 2026 the University of New South Wales count put it at 9,030 drug listings, behind only Drughub. Its first post on Dread was in September 2022, and it reached 9,260 drug listings in the year to May 2026. It stopped paying out between mid-September and 1 October 2026. No police force or analytics firm has published anything on its end so far.

Nexus

Opened

January 2024

Closed

Between mid-September and 1 October 2026

Ended

Stopped paying out

Size

6,943 drug listings in May 2026

Nexus grew fast for a market less than three years old. Its first post on Dread was in January 2024, and by May 2026 it had 6,943 drug listings, the third-largest count of any market that month. It stopped paying out in the same weeks as Dark Matter, between mid-September and 1 October 2026, so two of the five biggest markets by drug listings went within weeks of each other, as Archetyp and Abacus had in the summer of 2025. No police force or analytics firm has published anything on its end so far.

How darknet market technology changed, 2011 to 2026

Almost every change on this list was a reaction to one of the endings above. How escrow, Finalize Early, multisig and vendor bonds work on a market today is explained in the guide to how darknet markets work; this is the order they arrived in.

None of it stopped markets ending. Multisig and walletless payment make an exit scam smaller, and Monero makes the money harder to follow, but Monopoly was walletless and its server still produced 288 arrests, and Archetyp took only Monero and was seized anyway. The Monero rows are there because bitcoin payments can be traced, which the guide to whether bitcoin is anonymous explains.

The biggest darknet markets, by each measure

Hydra is the biggest by money and by accounts; AlphaBay had the most listings; Abacus held the largest share of the Western trade. There is no single ranking, because each figure measures something different and comes from a different source.

US prosecutors gave Silk Road two dollar totals, and both are right. In October 2013 prosecutors converted its lifetime sales of more than 9.5 million bitcoin at the exchange rate on the day of the seizure and got about $1.2 billion. At sentencing in May 2015 the figure was more than $200 million in sales, valued when the sales happened. A bitcoin was worth about $8.67 in June 2011; the October 2013 conversion works out at about $126. That rise is most of the gap. The 173,991 bitcoin seized is a third number again: the coins police took, not the sales.

Hydra's two big numbers measure different periods. The $5.2 billion is everything its wallets received over about seven years; the BKA's €1.23 billion is turnover in 2020 alone. Read that way they are consistent, and both put Hydra far beyond any Western market. AlphaBay's "over 200,000 users and 40,000 vendors" is weaker: the Justice Department attributes it to "one AlphaBay staff member", while it gives the listings count as its own. Abacus's larger figure is an estimate. TRM counted nearly $100 million in bitcoin; the $300 to $400 million is that count grossed up by an assumption about the Monero it cannot see.

How long darknet markets last, and how they end

Most markets close within two years. The UN's average for 2010 to 2023 is one year and four months. The spread is wide: Utopia lasted eight days, Hydra about seven years, Dream about five and a half. Of the 60 markets in the table at the top, 29 ended with the operators keeping the money or stopping payouts, 16 were seized, 9 were closed by their own operators, and 6 ended some other way or nobody knows how.

The markets in the table lasted longer than the UN's average, about two years and four months at the median, because a market has to survive a while to get big enough to be on it. Nine of the 60 still closed inside a year. Size did not protect them either: Archetyp had run for five years when it was seized, and Abacus for almost four when it vanished.

Exit scams cluster at the moment a market is busiest. Wall Street Market's administrators took the escrow in April 2019, the month Dream shut and its buyers were looking for somewhere new. Abacus had its record month after Archetyp's seizure and was gone in early July 2025. A market that suddenly has twice the users has twice the money sitting in its wallets, and that is the point at which taking it pays the most.

Police have used seized servers to arrest vendors one and two years later, and the data of exit-scammed markets such as Bohemia and Tor2Door reached them anyway. The operations and the sentences are in the takedowns timeline. A market that announces its closure, as Agora, White House Market and MGM Grand did, still leaves open orders in escrow on the last day, which is why the exit scam warning signs matter even for a market with a good record.

Where buyers went when a market closed

Usually to the biggest market still standing, and that market was often the next to go. After Operation Onymous in 2014, Europol wrote, buyers and vendors moved to the remaining markets, "the two largest and most successful of which were Agora and Evolution," and prices on the survivors rose. After Evolution's exit scam, Agora and several smaller markets, AlphaBay among them, "absorbed the displaced vendors and customers." Total sales fell after Onymous but were back above half their previous level within weeks.

Silk Road, October 2013

To Black Market Reloaded and Sheep, then to Silk Road 2.0, five weeks later. Sheep and BMR were both gone by December.

AlphaBay, July 2017

To Hansa, where new members rose eight-fold. Hansa was already run by the Dutch police.

Dream and Wall Street, spring 2019

The markets that grew next were Nightmare, Cryptonia, Empire and Samsara, the last built on Dream's own code. Of those four, only Empire was still running in 2020.

Hydra, April 2022

To OMG!OMG!, which reached 65.2% of the trade on 23 April 2022, then to Mega, Blacksprut, Solaris and Kraken. TRM counted at least 12 new Russian-language markets within eight months.

Archetyp, June 2025

To Abacus, which had its best month and then went offline weeks later.

Abacus, July 2025

To Torzon, which Chainalysis calls Abacus's "primary successor", and, by TRM's account, to vendors' own shops and to Telegram.

The pattern held for Hydra, which is where it matters most. After the seizure the money moved to its successors: TRM says the Russian-language markets that emerged after Hydra had more than 97% of global darknet drug revenue by 2024, and Chainalysis put darknet market flows at nearly $2.6 billion in 2025. For a buyer the lesson is narrower. The market everyone moves to in the week after a closure is the one most likely to be watched, or to be counting the deposits.

History of darknet markets: questions

What was the first darknet market?

Silk Road, which opened in February 2011, is the first one that worked the way markets still work: a Tor site, bitcoin, and escrow held by the market. The Farmer's Market was on Tor a year earlier, in 2010, but took payment through PayPal and Western Union, which is how the DEA found its operators. The first drug deal arranged over a network was earlier still, between Stanford and MIT students on ARPANET in 1971 or 1972.

What was the biggest darknet market ever?

Hydra, a Russian-language market seized by German police in April 2022. The US Justice Department says it received about $5.2 billion in cryptocurrency from 2015 and handled about 80% of all darknet market crypto transactions in 2021. The biggest Western market by listings was AlphaBay, with over 250,000 drug and chemical listings when it was seized in 2017.

How long do darknet markets last?

The UN's average for markets between 2010 and 2023 is one year and four months. Hydra lasted about seven years and Dream Market about five and a half; Utopia lasted eight days. The big markets last longer than average, about two years and four months at the median, but the oldest Western market of 2025, Archetyp, was seized anyway.

How do most darknet markets end?

Most often in an exit scam, though not in a majority of cases. Of 60 major closed markets from 2011 to 2026, 29 ended with the operators keeping users' money or stopping payouts, 16 were seized by police, 9 were closed by their own operators, and 6 ended some other way or are unexplained.

What happened to Silk Road?

The FBI arrested its operator, Ross Ulbricht, in San Francisco on 1 October 2013 and seized the site the next day. He was sentenced to life in May 2015 and pardoned on 21 January 2025. Silk Road 2.0 opened five weeks after the seizure and was itself seized in November 2014.

What happened to AlphaBay?

The FBI and DEA seized it in July 2017; its founder, Alexandre Cazes, died in custody in Thailand a week after his arrest. Someone using the name DeSnake relaunched it in August 2021, taking only Monero, and the relaunched market stopped in February 2023. No police force has claimed it, and the EU drugs agency records an exit scam.

What happened to Dark Matter and Nexus?

Both stopped paying out between mid-September and 1 October 2026. In the University of New South Wales count, Dark Matter peaked at 9,260 drug listings in the year to May 2026 and Nexus had 6,943 that May, and in January 2026 both were among the five biggest markets by drug listings. No police force or analytics firm has published anything on either ending so far.

Which darknet markets are still open?

The biggest are Russian-language: the UN names Kraken, OMG, Mega and Blacksprut as the largest in 2025. Among Western markets, Chainalysis and the UN name Torzon the largest by money since Abacus closed; by drug listings, Drughub is bigger. The current list, with how each market holds your money, is on the best darknet markets page.

Sources

The documents this history leans on most. Smaller, one-market sources are linked in the entries above.

• EU drugs agency, darknet market lifetimes and reasons for closure, the opening and closing months and recorded endings behind the table.
• UNODC World Drug Report 2026, the average market life and the largest markets of 2025.
• Soska and Christin, USENIX Security 2015, the Carnegie Mellon study of 35 markets and their sales.
• Gwern Branwen's dataset of market closures, closing dates and the reasons given for many early markets.
• Europol, IOCTA 2015: darknets, Sheep's losses and where users went after Onymous.
• FBI complaint against Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road's transactions and accounts.
• Justice Department, Silk Road seizure release, the $1.2 billion lifetime sales figure.
• Justice Department, AlphaBay release, its listings and the 2017 takedown.
• Europol, AlphaBay and Hansa release, the Dutch takeover of Hansa.
• Justice Department, Hydra release, Hydra's $5.2 billion and its share of the trade.
• BKA, Hydra seizure release, accounts, turnover and the German servers.
• BKA, Wall Street Market release, listings, customer accounts and sellers.
• Europol, DarkMarket release, users, sellers and the coins seized in 2021.
• Justice Department, Empire Market charges, its four million transactions.
• Dutch police, Bohemia and Cannabia release, listings, transactions and the exit scam.
• Justice Department, Incognito sentencing, accounts, sales and the stolen deposits.
• BKA, Archetyp indictment release, its turnover and orders.
• TRM Labs on Abacus, its share of Western sales and the likely exit scam.
• Chainalysis, darknet markets in 2026, market flows and Abacus's successor.
• University of New South Wales drug-market monitoring, listing counts for recent markets.