According to Chainalysis, the revenue generated by underground marketplaces registered a double-digit decline in 2022 as the popular Hydra Market closed in April.
Dark web revenue fell from $3.1 billion in 2021 to just $1.5 billion last year, according to a blockchain analytics firm, with average daily revenue across all markets dropping from $4.2 million just before Hydra shut down. of $447,000.
Overall drug market revenues did not fully recover, but slowly returned to previous levels thanks to the success of Mega Darknet Market, Blacksprut Market and OMG!OMG! Market following Hydra’s takedown.
According to Chainalysis, criminals are moving to these mostly drug markets in ever-increasing numbers after they also started offering money-laundering services, as did Hydra. Some, like OMG, offer hacking utilities and stolen banking information.
In fact, Chainalysis says that OMG has some overlap with Hydra, which may suggest its administrators are involved in the project. These include the same “dead drop” exchange options for vendors and buyers as well as shared cryptocurrency deposit addresses.
“OMG’s central wallet is a high-risk exchange with a large presence in Russia, sending large amounts of cryptocurrency to the same group of deposit addresses,” the report claims.
“The overlapping use of deposit addresses suggests that these deposit addresses may be managed by the same individual. It suggests that they may even be duplicates.”
Single-vendor shops are also emerging as an alternative to large marketplaces, allowing vendors to save fees that would otherwise be incurred by marketplace administrators like Hydra.
However, fraudulent stores also continued to decline in 2022.
“Fraud shops are a unique segment of darknet markets that sell compromised data, such as stolen credit card information and other forms of personally identifiable information (PII), that can be used for fraudulent activities. There is,” explains Chainalysis.
“The decline was driven by the closure of high-profile scammers like the Bypass Shop, which closed in March. It looks like we’ve been hit by a turmoil with almost zero revenue.”
