Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has published a new report detailing the dynamics of the darknet markets and fraud shops after the collapse of the former giant Hydra Market due to the joint actions of the authorities in Germany and the United States. .
After the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Hydra in April and German agencies tidy At its close, average daily revenue for all dark web markets fell from $4.2 million to $447,000.
Total darknet market revenue for 2022 was $1.5 billion, a significant decrease from $3.1 billion in 2021. Other markets are likely to channel their efforts to attract former Hydra vendors and users, as most of the Fraud stores gained their initial market share after the collapse of the platform.
The fight for dominance of the Darknet market
according to him report, three major darknet markets gained dominance after the fall of Hydra. While its revenue didn’t come close to that of Hydra, Mega Darknet Market, Blacksprut Market, and OMG!OMG! The market registered higher actions.
Notably, each of the three platforms dominated the market at different periods. The first was OMG, whose period of dominance was immediately after Hydra’s demise.
Although OMG went live in July 2020, its deposit volumes were so low that it was more of a personal operation than a darknet marketplace. However, the platform recorded high inflows as soon as Hydra went down, most of which came from Hydra counterparties.
The entries continued until June, when OMG suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attack caused vendors and users to migrate to the Blacksprut Market and Mega Darknet Market. Blacksprut was also hacked in November, forcing users to move to Mega Market.
However, OMG recorded more entries and activity than Blacksprut and Mega Markets throughout 2022.
An administrative link?
Interestingly, on-chain data has shown that OMG core wallets use a pool of deposit addresses previously used by Hydra, which is owned by a high-risk exchange that operates primarily in Russia.
Blacksprut and Mega sent funds to the same set of addresses but not as many as OMG. This suggests an administrative or supplier overlap between the four markets, but mainly between Hydra and OMG.
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