Patterns recommended to avoid include hiring hitmen like Dread Pirate Roberts, and sharing handles for software questions on sites like Stack Exchange. Whilst a great many products are sold, drugs dominate the numbers of listings, with the drugs including cannabis, MDMA, modafinil,108109110 LSD, cocaine, and designer drugs. High-volume vendors launch standalone shops using Tor and Monero, reducing dependency on marketplaces.
However, trading behaviour in DWM closely resembles what is observed on regulated online platforms despite their significant differences in operational and legal nature14. Nevertheless, due to their unregulated nature, DWMs exhibit behaviours not observed in regulated marketplaces. They offer anonymity to their users by using and developing specialized tools. DWMs are accessed through darknet browsers supporting the onion routing protocol (e.g., Tor), which provides anonymous communication connections35.
- Darknet markets in 2025 prioritize accessibility and security, making drug shopping safer than ever.
- While the Bitcoin blockchain is publicly available on Bitcoin core37 or other third-party APIs such as Blockchain.com38, a market or a user can generate a new address for each transaction.
- Additional data related to this paper may be requested from the corresponding author.
- As such, a high closeness centrality does not intuitively imply a successful vendor.
Collective Dynamics Of Dark Web Marketplaces
The interpretation of distance more than a single edge away, i.e., a path, with respect to vendor success in cryptomarket communication networks is not straightforward. After all, other than having a shared author for one of the involved posts, the posts that were responsible for the formation of subsequent links in a path may be wholly unrelated to each other. For the weighted and directed variant, i.e., links representing responding to one another, the interpretation of paths (and their lengths) that start or end at a specific user are unclear as the path may not represent a single ‘conversation’. Therefore, we are likely better served by relying on the link representation of familiarity directly, i.e., using the undirected and unweighted variant. Because we also detected the largest share of vendors not found by any of the activity indicators with the unweighted bidirectional variant of harmonic closeness centrality, we report on this variant in the Results section. Our results also support recent recommendations of paying attention to individual sellers rather than entire DWMs40.
Seller-to-seller Network
Our results showed that, on average, it is possible to distinguish between vendors and non-vendors using both network centrality and the activity indicators. Additionally, we found that more successful vendors have on average higher centralities and activity indicators than less successful vendors. This holds for both current and (to a slightly lesser extent for) future success. However, it is important to remember that these findings are about the average case; perfect delineations cannot be made. Even so, they indicate that the rankings induced by the measures have predictive potential for vendor success and may be useful to law enforcement activities.
Large Number Of U2U Transactions
This suggests that the multiseller activity is sensitive to external shocks but also that it yields higher profits. Throughout the whole period of observation, the dominant category of buyers is market-U2U buyers followed by market-only buyers, representing on average 52% and 42% of all buyers, respectively. The U2U-only category is comparatively small, representing only 6% of all buyers on average. The number of market-U2U and market-only buyers also drops as a consequence of operation Bayonet.
The Role Of Law Enforcement In The Regulation Of Cryptomarkets (and The Limited Role Of Deterrence)
Third, at any given moment we classify entities as either buyers or sellers. For example, in some cases, a seller in a given market may behave as a buyer in a second market or in the U2U network. This multi-role classification, to be implemented in future work, can help gain a more nuanced understanding of the ecosystem and the structure of the dark web supply chains. Decentralized networks have become the backbone of modern darknet markets, offering unparalleled anonymity for buyers and sellers.
Drug delivery has displaced street- or house-based exchanges in some circumstances; drug markets have become segmented by class and race; and the opportunities for combining drug dealing with other vice-exploitation crimes has declined 44. Cryptomarkets extend some of these developments, seeking to emphasise conflict resolution, cooperation and professionalism and punish predation 45, 46, making their ethos more attractive to buyers and dealers 47. That may serve to reduce some of the collateral harms of the illicit drug market 48 while at the same time concentrating risk and systemic violence among an already marginalised segment of the drug-using population that has little access to drug-delivery methods. While the cryptomarkets do put gentrification to the fore, they also shift power in the marketplace and create new opportunities for vendors to develop exploitative or coercive strategies and techniques 49. Overall though, it does appear that utilising cryptomarket data such as that used here can shine a light on market activity that would otherwise be hard to pin down empirically.
How Do I Access Darknet Markets?
Our methodology aims to uncover whether the task of key player identification should center around plainly measuring user and forum activity, or that it requires leveraging specific patterns of user communication. We focus on a large-scale dataset from the Evolution cryptomarket, which we model as an evolving communication network. Results indicate that user and forum activity, measured through topic engagement, is best able to identify successful vendors.
Discover Content
Interestingly, while the other categories of sellers show signs of recovery relative to their previous levels, the number of multisellers remains low after that shock (see Supplementary Information Section S4). These insights help us understand why the dark web is increasingly attractive, not only to consumers of illicit drugs but to the people who supply them. The cryptomarkets are of interest partly because they alter the practical calculus around drug diffusion and partly because they contribute to the formation of digitally enabled drug use which emphasises a consumer relationship between buyer and seller. Cryptomarkets may provide new data sources which can inform our understanding of drug markets. We do not engage with darknet markets; our mission is exclusively dedicated to providing information for research and educational purposes. Vendors with high ratings and verified histories dominate these platforms, ensuring product quality.
Network Centrality Measures
Overall, the topic engagement indicator most consistently achieves high performance in terms of vendor recall. First, network centrality measures require the communication network to have developed and stabilised sufficiently before achieving reliable vendor recall. During the initial months the communication network and its structure are still undergoing significant changes. Consequently, we also see large fluctuations in vendor recall for the network measures between these months.
- In particular, our dataset does not include any attributes related to either users or their Bitcoin transactions, such as, whether the transaction represents an actual purchase or not.
- Dark net fora can, both theoretically and empirically, be split in those functioning as meeting places for the exchange of criminal information and those where criminal goods and services are traded, i.e., criminal marketplaces.
- These markets rely on encryption, escrow systems, and vendor ratings to function in a trustless environment.
- Additionally, we analyse the U2U network of transactions, i.e., the transactions between pairs of market first-neighbors where the source and destination nodes are market users without the market as an intermediate.
- Some respondents said that being protected from physical risk on the dark web is not only a benefit for existing drug suppliers, but may also make the activity attractive to people who would not otherwise be willing to sell drugs.
Data And Methods
Individuals who are more affluent and better connected have often continued drug consumption with little interruption. Those who do not have access to these distribution modes have often pursued shifting and sometimes predatory street markets. The impact of the darknet has to be fully seen in this context, as one component of an evolving social-technical infrastructure for drug distribution and consumption may include harm-reduction advice such as drug-checking services 60. Cryptomarkets are part of an evolving trend where communities of PWUD adapt and develop technological systems to their ends.
LinkOut – More Resources
Buyers benefit from detailed feedback systems, where each transaction is reviewed for potency, shipping speed, and stealth packaging. Reliable onion links are maintained through crowdsourced market lists, minimizing phishing risks. Finally, despite its large size, the sample only allowed us to perform non-parametric tests due to the lack of normal distribution. The re-evaluation of the indicators applied in the questionnaire, taking statistical aspects into account, could help create a database suitable for running more robust parametric tests and developing models. The findings, criminal policy recommendations, and criminological research remarks presented above are summarized in Table Table66. The datasets generated by the survey research and analyzed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
