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Archetyp Market

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Archetyp
Type of site
Darknet market
Available inEnglish
OwnerASNT[1]
Created byASNT[1]
URLarchetyp.cc (defunct)
CommercialYes
RegistrationRequired
Users612,000[2]
LaunchedMay 2020
Current statusSeized

Archetyp or Archetyp market was a darknet market that was launched in May 2020.[3] It operated on the Tor network and was therefore only accessible via a specialized browser. All transactions were conducted using Monero, a cryptocurrency designed to be private.[4] Archetyp only accepted drug-related listings.[5][6]

It was seized in June 2025.[7][8][9]

History

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In an interview with German website tarnkappe.info [de], the founder of the market stated that they grew up in a deprived area and first encountered drugs at a young age. After trying LSD at age 20, they reflected on their life of alcohol abuse and drug-related anti-social behavior and realized that it did not fit with the social good they had wanted to do as a child. They were impressed by the libertarian philosophy of the Silk Road website and, after seeing that many of the markets which replaced it were more focused on profit than this philosophy, decided to set up their own to support the European drug scene and advocate drug liberalization.[10][11]

At the May 2023 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, researchers presented an onion service popularity estimation algorithm which found that, after accounting for phishing sites, Archetyp Market was the most popular onion service website on Tor.[12]

According to a February 2024 study in the journal International Criminal Justice Review, most of the users of the previously-popular darknet market Flugsvamp migrated to Archetyp following security issues and allegations of fraud at Flugsvamp.[13]

Research by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales found that Archetyp was the largest of the 11 darknet markets monitored in May 2024 by number of listings, with an average of 8,607.[14] This was up from January 2024, when Archetyp came fourth after Incognito, Bohemia and Nemesis (which all closed before May).[15]

Seizure

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Archetyp was seized by the BKA in June 2025 in an operation called Operation Deep Sentinel.[7][8]

A 30-year-old German national was arrested in Barcelona on June 11th.[16] He is accused of being ASNT. The server infrastructure was hosted in a data center in the Netherlands and was also seized.[2]

One moderator and six of the top vendors on the platform were also arrested and assets worth 7.8 million euros were seized in the process.[2]

The onion site and the clear-net site were both replaced with a seizure banner that links to the operation's website. That site hosts a video addressed to the "underground economy".[2]

At the time of the seizure, the total trade volume exceeded 250 million euros.[2]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Archetyp: From Underground Hideaway to Digital Revolution and 420k Users". DarknetDiscussions.com. 2024-04-29. Archived from the original on 2024-09-01. Retrieved 2024-09-01.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Darknet-Handelsplattform "Archetyp Market" abgeschaltet – Betreiber identifiziert und festgenommen". BKA (in German). Retrieved 2025-06-16.
  3. ^ Gatlan, Sergiu (2025-06-16). "Police seizes Archetyp Market drug marketplace, arrests admin". BleepingComputer. Retrieved 2025-06-16.
  4. ^ Nosov, V. V.; Manzhai, O. V.; Kovtun, V. O. (2023-09-28). "Technical, forensic and organisational aspects of work with Monero cryptocurrency". Law and Safety (in Ukrainian). 90 (3): 102–125. doi:10.32631/pb.2023.3.09. ISSN 2617-2933. deyaki rynky pidtry-muyutʹ vyklyuchno Monero, napryklad Archetyp деякі ринки підтри-мують виключно Monero, наприклад Archetyp [some markets support Monero exclusively, such as Archetyp]
  5. ^ Sudan, Harjeev Kour; Tai, Andy Man Yeung; Kim, Jane; Krausz, Reinhard Michael (2023-01-01). "Decrypting the cryptomarkets: Trends over a decade of the Dark Web drug trade". Drug Science, Policy and Law. 9: 20503245231215668. doi:10.1177/20503245231215668. ISSN 2050-3245.
  6. ^ Wang, Yichao; Arief, Budi; Hernandez-Castro, Julio (2024-06-05). "Analysis of Security Mechanisms of Dark Web Markets". European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference. EICC '24. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 120–127. doi:10.1145/3655693.3655700. ISBN 979-8-4007-1651-5.
  7. ^ a b "Operation Deep Sentinel". Operation Deep Sentinel. Retrieved June 16, 2025.
  8. ^ a b "Europe-wide takedown hits longest-standing dark web drug market". Europol.
  9. ^ "Dark web drug market busted by European and US authorities". Reuters. 2025-06-16. Retrieved 2025-06-16.
  10. ^ "Archetyp: neuer Darknet-Drogenshop will an die Spitze - Interview". tarnkappe.info [de] (in German). 2021-03-16. Archived from the original on 2024-07-13. Retrieved 2024-11-11.
  11. ^ Spiegel, Der (2025-06-16). "Archetyp Market: BKA schaltet große Darknetsite ab". DER SPIEGEL (in German). Retrieved 2025-06-16.
  12. ^ Wang, Chunmian; Luo, Junzhou; Ling, Zhen; Luo, Lan; Fu, Xinwen (17 May 2023). "A Comprehensive and Long-term Evaluation of Tor V3 Onion Services". IEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. IEEE. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10229057. ISBN 979-8-3503-3414-2. Finally, the top 6 most popular core websites are Archetyp market, ROYALMARKET, DARKMONEY, VClub, dark.fail and ASAP market. The fifth website is a well-known yellow page and the rest are black markets. It shows that black markets are very popular on the Tor network.
  13. ^ Waldner, Oscar; Moeller, Kim (September 2024). "Collective Displacement of Regional Cryptomarket Vendors—A Study on the Aftermath of the Flugsvamp 3.0 Closure". International Criminal Justice Review. 34 (3). Sage Journals: 206–223. doi:10.1177/10575677241229682. ISSN 1057-5677.
  14. ^ "Polizei legt Darknet-Plattform still – Spur nach Südhessen". Mittelhessen (in German). 2025-06-16. Retrieved 2025-06-16.

See also

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