Markets: Agartha

Agartha Market came about sometime during early 2019 and reportedly exit-scammed in February of 2020. The marketplace offered a diverse multi-payment system that allowed users to pay in Bitcoin, Litecoin, DASH, Bitcoin Cash, Vertcoin, and Monero. While Agartha was primarily a drug-focused marketplace that prohibited the sale of weapons and poisons, they also prohibited the sale of what they called “the most dangerous drugs”, which included Fentanyl, Heroin, Crystal Meth, MDPV, Crack Cocaine, DNP, Scopolamine, and “other synthetic concoctions that haven’t been thoroughly studied”. Excluding its’ prohibition of several higher-risk substances and its’ diverse payment system, it was very much like other dark-net markets as it featured Multi-Signature transactions, escrow, PGP communications, 2FA logins, and pin and phrase protections.

A lot of people considered it as a “clone” of the Agora marketplace as it used the same theme and had similar functionalities, though it copied features from many dark-net markets, and none of its’ staff members were ever affiliated with Agora.

Several news outlets and marketplace users reported that many of the product listings on Agartha were fake and copied from other marketplaces, and that the sites’ administrators were behind the fraudulent listings and actively engaged in attempts to defraud their users. There might be some merit to these claims, considering that the administrators stole all of their users’ funds when they permanently shut the market down.