Markets: Monopoly

Monopoly Market was launched on July 13 of 2019 and went offline on December 28 of 2021, during the same time as Cartel Market. Monopoly was initially a user-less, wallet-less, Monero-only marketplace that only allowed for the sale of drugs by vendors who were already trusted and well-established on other marketplaces, though they implemented new features later on such as a Bitcoin payment system. In order for a vendor to sell on Monopoly, they had to be approved by the markets’ staff. All listings on the market were vetted by staff before they became public, and if a vendor had too many disputes, they would be banned from the marketplace.

It has been speculated by many that Monopoly shut down in an exit-scam, however, the market staff stopped accepting new applications for vendors several months before it went offline, there were reportedly only around 180 active vendors on the site, many of whom were limited to 50 open orders at a time, and while not all vendors were granted finalize-early privileges and some of the funds were held in the markets’ escrow, it does not appear that the markets’ staff were planning an exit-scam. Considering that Monopoly Market went down at the exact same time when Cartel Market was seized, it appears to be more likely that it was either ran by the same people who operated Cartel Market and law enforcement never announced the seizure of Monopoly, or the markets’ staff shut the site down at the same time out of fear of it being seized. The administrator of Monopoly, “Monopolyofficial”, later made a statement claiming that the market was seized or its’ host sent information about its’ servers to law enforcement.

This article was written a while ago and will be updated.