One darknet marketplace is down, but 30 new just popped up

Huione Guarantee, that big shot in the crypto darknet marketplace world, gets shut down. You’d think the party’s over, right?

Wrong. The moment Huione Guarantee closed shop in May, after Telegram yanked thousands of its accounts and channels, something wild happened.

Have you heard about the hydra?

Instead of the ecosystem collapsing, it exploded. Like a hydra after lost its head, thirty new marketplaces popped up to fill the void.

Elliptic dropped a report Monday revealing this chaos. The biggest beneficiary? A marketplace called Tudou Guarantee, it doubled its user base since May.

The crypto inflows there now match what Huione Guarantee had before it went dark.

It’s like watching your office’s top salesman suddenly quit, only to see his clients swarm over to a new guy who’s suddenly closing twice the deals. You can’t make this stuff up.

Lineage

And it’s not just the users jumping ship. Merchants, operators selling stolen data, laundering money, and pushing illicit goods, have also migrated to Tudou. They’re setting up shop, ready to keep the scam machine humming.

Elliptic’s tracking over 30 other Telegram-based dark markets that saw a bump in activity after Huione’s exit. The closure didn’t kill the beast at all. It just spread its heads wider.

Huione Guarantee actually owns a 30% stake in Tudou since last December. So, it’s like the old boss quietly passing the torch to a trusted protege while the world thinks the whole operation’s dead. Sneaky, huh?

The reign isn’t over

Now, some people over at Chainalysis claimed Huione Guarantee’s activity didn’t really drop.

But Elliptic sets the record straight, they’re mixing up Huione Guarantee with Huione Group’s other businesses, like Huione Pay, the legit-looking payment platform in Cambodia that also dabbles in crypto payments and, let’s be honest, probably launders some dirty money.

While Huione Pay keeps moving big volumes, Huione Guarantee’s transactions have basically flatlined since late May.

So shutting down Huione Guarantee sent actual shockwaves through the darknet guarantee market, sure.

But instead of ending the game, it handed the reigns to a dozen or more hungry players ready to grow.

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