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10 months after a sudden resurgence, AlphaBay has managed to reclaim its leadership position in the digital underground.
For more than a year, underground trading platforms and law enforcement agencies have been playing endless leapfrog - as soon as one underground market is turned off, a new one immediately appears. However, it rarely happens that a marketplace that was once disabled returns half a decade later and wins the status of a leader in the black market. And that's exactly what happened in the case of AlphaBay, the past and future "king" of the smuggling economy.
In July 2017, as part of Operation Bayonet, law enforcement managed to shut down AlphaBay, seize the central server in Lithuania, and arrest the site's creator, Alexandre Cazes, in Bangkok. However, last August, AlphaBay's second administrator, an information security expert known as DeSnake, suddenly appeared out of nowhere and announced the restoration of the marketplace in an improved form. Now, 10 months later, thanks to a series of shutdowns and mysterious disappearances of a number of marketplaces, the updated AlphaBay is confidently regaining its position as a leader in the digital underground. According to some reports, the site has already managed to do this.
“Yes, AlphaBay is currently the number one marketplace on the dark web. I've said before that we'll be number one. And I already said that if I said so, then it will be so, ”DeSnake said in correspondence with WIRED journalists.
The statement of the new site administrator is at least partially justified. For example, AlphaBay had over 30,000 unique items for sale last week (mostly drugs, but also lots of malware and stolen data). For comparison, in September last year, the site sold only 500 products.
Another old marketplace called ASAP has over 50,000 listings for sale, but ASAP sellers often duplicate their offers. According to Flashpoint, AlphaBay had over 1,300 active sellers at the start of the year, while ASAP had about 1,000 active sellers. Other dark web forums, notably Archetyp and Incognito, have only a few thousand or even hundreds of listings for sale. It follows from all this that AlphaBay may indeed be the most popular marketplace among darknet sellers at the moment.
Be that as it may, the number of products currently sold on AlphaBay is only a small fraction of the entire range offered to customers at the time of the site's closure in 2017 (350 thousand products). At that time, the marketplace was rightfully considered the largest in the history of the darknet.
According to the FBI, AlphaBay was 10 times the size of the legendary underground marketplace Silk Road. According to Chainalysis, AlphaBay handles an average of $2 million in daily sales and purchases. However, according to DeSnake, the site's revenue has yet to reach its 2017 highs.
When AlphaBay suddenly rose from the ashes last year, many analysts speculated that law enforcement was behind the site's resurrection. However, DeSnake has since been able to confirm his identity as a former associate of AlphaBay's creator. For example, he signed his messages with the same PGP cryptographic key that he used before.
According to DeSnake, he has developed several protections that will allow him to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. In particular, he is located on the territory of one of the former Soviet republics, which does not have an extradition agreement with the United States. In addition, the marketplace does not use bitcoins, but Monero, which complicates the analysis of the blockchain by specialists.
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For more than a year, underground trading platforms and law enforcement agencies have been playing endless leapfrog - as soon as one underground market is turned off, a new one immediately appears. However, it rarely happens that a marketplace that was once disabled returns half a decade later and wins the status of a leader in the black market. And that's exactly what happened in the case of AlphaBay, the past and future "king" of the smuggling economy.
In July 2017, as part of Operation Bayonet, law enforcement managed to shut down AlphaBay, seize the central server in Lithuania, and arrest the site's creator, Alexandre Cazes, in Bangkok. However, last August, AlphaBay's second administrator, an information security expert known as DeSnake, suddenly appeared out of nowhere and announced the restoration of the marketplace in an improved form. Now, 10 months later, thanks to a series of shutdowns and mysterious disappearances of a number of marketplaces, the updated AlphaBay is confidently regaining its position as a leader in the digital underground. According to some reports, the site has already managed to do this.
“Yes, AlphaBay is currently the number one marketplace on the dark web. I've said before that we'll be number one. And I already said that if I said so, then it will be so, ”DeSnake said in correspondence with WIRED journalists.
The statement of the new site administrator is at least partially justified. For example, AlphaBay had over 30,000 unique items for sale last week (mostly drugs, but also lots of malware and stolen data). For comparison, in September last year, the site sold only 500 products.
Another old marketplace called ASAP has over 50,000 listings for sale, but ASAP sellers often duplicate their offers. According to Flashpoint, AlphaBay had over 1,300 active sellers at the start of the year, while ASAP had about 1,000 active sellers. Other dark web forums, notably Archetyp and Incognito, have only a few thousand or even hundreds of listings for sale. It follows from all this that AlphaBay may indeed be the most popular marketplace among darknet sellers at the moment.
Be that as it may, the number of products currently sold on AlphaBay is only a small fraction of the entire range offered to customers at the time of the site's closure in 2017 (350 thousand products). At that time, the marketplace was rightfully considered the largest in the history of the darknet.
According to the FBI, AlphaBay was 10 times the size of the legendary underground marketplace Silk Road. According to Chainalysis, AlphaBay handles an average of $2 million in daily sales and purchases. However, according to DeSnake, the site's revenue has yet to reach its 2017 highs.
When AlphaBay suddenly rose from the ashes last year, many analysts speculated that law enforcement was behind the site's resurrection. However, DeSnake has since been able to confirm his identity as a former associate of AlphaBay's creator. For example, he signed his messages with the same PGP cryptographic key that he used before.
According to DeSnake, he has developed several protections that will allow him to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. In particular, he is located on the territory of one of the former Soviet republics, which does not have an extradition agreement with the United States. In addition, the marketplace does not use bitcoins, but Monero, which complicates the analysis of the blockchain by specialists.
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