Market History — Timeline & Succession Map

Thirteen Closures, Three Causes

Thirteen major market closures from 2011 through 2025 have well-documented end dates and causes. Each one falls into one of three categories: seized by law enforcement, ended in an exit scam, or shut down voluntarily by the operators on their own terms. A fourth, smaller category — platforms that simply stopped functioning without a clear public cause — covers the rest.

Sorted by lifespan, the thirteen values are 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6 — a median of exactly 3 years. Four closures (31%) were law enforcement seizures, four (31%) were exit scams, three (23%) were voluntary shutdowns, and two (15%) simply ceased operating without a clearly stated cause. Exit scams and seizures are tied as the single most common outcome — voluntary, planned shutdowns are the minority case, not the norm.

Two Different Succession Patterns

Look closely at the migration column and two distinct patterns emerge. The first is what you'd expect: a market closes, and a successor built specifically to absorb the fallout opens shortly after. White House Market's voluntary shutdown fed directly into DrugHub, run by the same team with the same Monero-only, PGP-mandatory philosophy. Archetyp and Abacus both went down within months of each other in 2025, and Catharsis was built with a one-click migration tool specifically to catch that displaced vendor base. CanadaHQ's closure left a regional gap that WeTheNorth filled almost immediately.

The second pattern is rarer and doesn't appear anywhere else in this table: Bazaar didn't inherit vendors from a closed market at all. It grew out of the BreakingBad forum, which never closed — it added a transactional layer on top of a community that had already been operating for years. That's a fundamentally different kind of continuity than a successor market, and it's why Bazaar's PGP key, documented in the PGP key and canary archive, predates every other active market key by nearly three years.

Four of the thirteen closures in the table above — Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0, AlphaBay, and Hansa — have no listed successor at all. Their vendor bases dispersed across whatever markets existed at the time rather than consolidating into one clear inheritor, which was the norm before the deliberate migration-tool approach that DrugHub and Catharsis later formalized.

What This Means for the 8 Markets Active Today

Three of the eight markets active today carry a direct lineage from a closed predecessor: DrugHub (White House Market, plus a secondary absorption from Tor2Door), Catharsis (Archetyp and Abacus), and WeTheNorth (CanadaHQ). Bazaar's continuity runs through an unbroken forum rather than a market succession. The remaining four — DarkMatter, TorZon, Nexus, and Black Ops — launched independently, without inheriting an existing vendor base from a specific prior platform.

None of this predicts which of the eight will last. A three-year median lifespan means half of the markets in this table lasted longer and half lasted less — including some, like White House Market, that shut down on their own terms after building a strong reputation. Longevity is a data point, not a guarantee, and it pairs naturally with the market scorecard, where operational history is one of six independent criteria rather than the only one that matters.