Markets: Nucleus

Nucleus Market was founded on November 24 of 2014 and existed until April 13 of 2016, when it exit-scammed with roughly 5000 Bitcoins, which were worth approximately 2.2 million dollars during the time. It featured traditional and Multi-Signature escrow, and provided users the option to conduct transactions using Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Darkcoin. Despite offering some new features, the marketplace itself was very similar to the Evolution market in both its’ layout design and functionality, and that it allowed merchants to sell a wide-variety of different types of contraband, which lead to speculation among internet users that the market was operated by Verto and Kimble, the owners of Evolution. This speculation increased even more after Nucleus shut down in an exit-scam.

Some users on Reddit claimed that a vendor, “theDmaster”, was in a rife with the Nucleus moderators, was banned from the market, and later hacked the marketplace in order to steal funds from it. There is not enough evidence to confirm this to be true, however, it seems unlikely considering that the sites’ staff remained completely silent after the markets’ closure, and even if true, it is unlikely that the hacker stole all of the markets funds.