Two months after White House Market’s retirement, comes another surprise; ToRReZ, currently the second largest market by the total number of listings, has announced they will be shutting down. After close to two years of operation, on December 17th, 2021, purchasing will be officially disabled as well as a few other essential market functions.
ToRReZ market administrator’s announcement.
Although ToRReZ’s listing volume was greatly dominated by illicit substances, with nearly two thirds of their listings being in the “Drugs and Chemicals” category, ToRReZ also hosted a large offering of fraud and other cybercrime related listings. Considering ToRReZ hosted 2683 vendors, with 1412 of those active on the market in the last 7 days, and about 15% of the total of all currently active darknet market listings, their departure will leave, as mrblonde puts it, “quite a big gap in darknet markets”.
Current Statistics of the market
Format: total / last 7 days
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ToRReZ Market’s listings
One thing that is interesting to read in mrblonde’s goodbye letter is the following: “While choosing a new market, please use your common sense. I would personally avoid any “established” market as [the] older they get, [the] bigger chance of collapsing is. Please give a chance to the smaller markets, which are not [as] loud as others. This is exactly how we became no1 – being quiet and doing our job, serving customers 24/7 for 675 […] days.”
It is true that bigger markets indeed leave room for a possible exit scam, when the market administrators find they have made a sufficient profit, or an honorable retirement like it seems to be in this case. However, small markets, on the other hand, often have difficulty gaining traction due to a lack of trust from buyers. After all, markets often act as an escrow for transactions and are also the medium with which “disputes” between buyers and vendors may occur; both operations necessitate a trustworthy relationship between all parties involved. Ultimately, most buyers follow their favorite and trusted vendors to the market where they will be migrating.
A Dread thread with vendors announcing where they will keep doing business.
With many big markets exiting the darknet market scene recently, it sure makes for an interesting turn of events! Of course, the darknet market ecosystem is ever changing, and Flare will do its best to keep you up to date with everything in that regard.
