For two and a half years, the Dread Pirate Roberts and his Silk Road black market ruled the Dark Web. But last year’s FBI’s takedown of that narcotics smorgasbord opened the underground trade to competitors. Now those sites have a new leader, one that’s bigger than the Silk Road ever was and continues to grow explosively.
The online bazaar for contraband known as “Agora” now has more product listings than any other online black market, according to a report released last week by the Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit focused on internet safety. The analysis counts 16,137 products for sale on the site, which is protected by the anonymity software Tor and accepts only bitcoin. That’s about 200 more listings than Silk Road 2.0, a reincarnation of the original Silk Road launched earlier this year by several of the same administrators. It’s also several thousand more than were offered on the first Silk Road before its seizure in October of last year.
“Just as on the rest of the internet, users on the dark net are very quick to move on to new things and move away from those products and websites that seem stale and old,” says Adam Benson, communications director at Digital Citizens Alliance. “Maybe that time has come for Silk Road.”
The latest numbers for Agora, whose name alludes to an ancient Greek meeting place or market, represent a dramatic shift from just four months ago, when it had only 7,400 product listings. That’s half as many as Silk Road 2.0 hosted at the time. The biggest factor explaining the shift, perhaps, has been the misfortune of Agora’s competitors. In February, Silk Road 2.0 claimed to have been hacked and lost about $2.7 million worth of users’ bitcoins. The market since says it’s repaid 83 percent of the victims of that hack, which affected 40 percent of the site’s active users.
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