AlphaBay, the largest darknet market, begins supporting Monero, a cryptocurrency meant to be more anonymous than Bitcoin
Jordan Pearson / Motherboard :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2016, AlphaBay — then the largest darknet market — added Monero alongside Bitcoin, betting that buyers and sellers wanted payments the public blockchain can't trace. The bet aged well: by 2021, Monero was the currency of choice for ransomware gangs wary of bitcoin's traceability, as Financial Times reporting on Monero's rise among ransomware crews documented.
The arc since is a cat-and-mouse story. Law enforcement seized AlphaBay itself in 2017 (the site went dark amid fears of a police action), it relaunched in 2021, and this year Germany, Europol, and Eurojust dismantled Archetyp Market, which had processed €250M+ in Monero across 612K users — proof that privacy coins slow but don't stop coordinated takedowns.
First-order effects
- AlphaBay's buyers and sellers gain a payment rail where sender, receiver, and amount are obscured — directly addressing the trail Bitcoin's transparent ledger leaves for investigators.
- Bitcoin's share of darknet transaction volume on the market's largest venue starts eroding at the moment of adoption.
Second-order effects
- Rival darknet markets face pressure to add Monero support or cede listings to AlphaBay, turning privacy-coin acceptance into table stakes rather than differentiation.
- Blockchain-analytics firms and law-enforcement units redirect effort from tracing bitcoin flows toward de-anonymizing Monero transactions and targeting market infrastructure instead of the coins themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, illicit-market economics bifurcate: mainstream crypto for surface-web commerce, privacy coins for darknet venues — while enforcement success depends on operational infiltration (as the Archetyp takedown showed) rather than financial forensics.
- Privacy-coin adoption by major markets hands regulators a recurring justification for pressuring exchanges to delist Monero, tightening the wall between compliant and non-compliant crypto ecosystems.
The trend: Darknet markets are migrating from Bitcoin to privacy coins like Monero as blockchain transparency makes bitcoin flows increasingly traceable.