The Hydra Market allowed vendors of a wide range of drugs, including heroin, other opiates, cocaine, methamphetamine, and Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), to connect with buyers who could grade dealers on a five-star scale. The Hydra Market has received nearly $5.2 billion in bitcoin for transactions on the site since 2015, raking in millions of dollars in commissions. The Hydra Market, whose customers were mostly from Russian-speaking countries, represented around 80 per cent of all darknet market-related bitcoin transactions last year. The darknet, also known as the dark web, is a collection of websites that are hidden from standard search engines and web browsers, with users accessing them via anonymous browsers. Its sales in 2020 were at least €1.23 billion, making it “the unlawful market with the biggest turnover in the world.” The platform has over 19,000 registered sellers and over 17 million registered customers. The “Hydra Market” has been used to sell illegal substances, counterfeit documents, intercepted data, and “digital services” since at least 2015. This operation was the outcome of multinational investigations that began in August 2021. In August 2017, Bitcoin, monero, and Ethereum were stated to be the preferred currencies for dark web transactions. On the dark web, cryptocurrency is popular because it allows users to conceal their identities and transaction details. One Russian man has also been charged by the US Department of Justice for his role in administering the website’s servers. One of Hydra Market’s putative operators was also charged with conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering. It was the longest-running dark web marketplace before it was shut down.Īccording to Frankfurt prosecutors, the Hydra Market platform is the world’s largest illicit marketplace. On April 4, 2022, federal law enforcement agencies in the United States and Germany announced the seizure of the website’s Germany-based servers and cryptocurrency holdings. Hydra was a Russian-language dark web marketplace that facilitated illegal drug trafficking and financial services such as bitcoin tumbling for money laundering and crypto currency-to-Russian-ruble exchange services and the sale of documents. But it can retrieve only an approximate 4 per cent of the search results, while the majority of the results are hidden.įrom the market, the German Federal Criminal Police seized cryptocurrency wallets containing $25 million in bitcoin. The ‘surface web’ and the ‘deep’ web make up the web, and it is the area of the internet that ordinary internet users may access using common search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others. The world wide web is a massive network of computers connected by the internet that hosts a massive collection of websites.