Archetyp or Archetyp Market was a darknet market that was launched in May 2020.[4] It operated on the Tor network and was therefore only accessible via an onion browser. All transactions were conducted using Monero, a cryptocurrency designed to be private.[5] Archetyp was an online drug marketplace, and only accepted drug-related listings.[6][7]
It was seized in June 2025 by the BKA, the German federal police agency.[8][9][10]
History
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.[11][12]
At the May 2023 IEEEConference 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.[13]
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.[14]
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.[15] This was up from January 2024, when Archetyp came fourth after Incognito, Bohemia and Nemesis (which all closed before May).[16]
Seizure
Archetyp was seized by the BKA in June 2025 in an operation called Operation Deep Sentinel.[8][9] The operation was a collaborative effort by the European Union and six countries.[17]
Marc Hegemeister,[18] a 30-year-old German national, was arrested in Barcelona on June 11th.[19] He is accused of being ASNT. The server infrastructure was hosted in a data center in the Netherlands and was also seized.[3]
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.[3]
The onion site and the clearnet site were both replaced with a seizure banner that links to the investigative operation's website. The linked site hosts a video addressed to the "underground economy".[3]
Archetyp was founded in May 2020 as an online marketplace to facilitate the illicit drug trade.[17] It did not host other black market listings such as those for firearms or prostitution.
The website operated in a format similar to other e-commerce platforms, with product listings, ratings, and user profiles. Vendors offered a range of drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, LSD, benzodiazepines, and methamphetamine.[17] Substances could be searched for by category, place of origin, and destination.
On the page for each listing, users could pick a predefined quantity of the drug chosen by the vendor, typically measured in grams or number of pills, and proceed to checkout.
At the time of seizure, there was a total of 17,000 listings on the website sold by 3,200 vendors.[20] Total trade volume exceeded 250 million euros.[3]
↑ 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. ISBN979-8-3503-3414-2. 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.
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