"Hydra" has lost one head
In early May 2022, the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) seized the German servers of the darknet marketplace Hydra and impounded 543 BTC (the equivalent of EUR 23 million at the time of the seizure).
According to the German law enforcement officials, the darknet marketplace's users totaled about 17 million customers and more than 19 000 sellers.
According to statistics and research, Hydra accounted for almost 80% of all revenues on the darknet in 2020 - that's at least 1.23 billion EUR.
U.S. authorities suspect that funds from Hydra were laundered through the cryptocurrency exchanger Suex and Telegram bot Chatex, among others. According to our information, money laundering was conducted through a number of services such as Bitzlato, Garantex, Eggchange, Buy-bitcoin, Tetchange, Cashbank and Suex.
The TokeScope Team decided to conduct a separate research concerning Hydra addresses that was arrested by the German police.
We studied the history of the address 1EHBzucTdcpESQhR9TqDPoucJFRAVruChx from which the German police seized 543 BTC on May 12, 2022. Further examination of the address shows that it was replenished within 1 day - April 05, 2022 by 90 transactions.
The analysis of the transactions shows that they are multiple in nature, i.e. merged from many small addresses to the Hydra address. The addresses that sent funds to 1EHBzucTdcpESQhR9TqDPoucJFRAVruChx, are the addresses of mixer services that change BTC, BCH, BSV, GRS coins.
Click here to see the full graph.
The systematic nature of the transactions, the receipt of all funds from the mixers, and the absence of random transactions indicate a clearly built structure of the Hydra darknet marketplace. The seizure of funds does not mean that the shadow market, which meets the demands of tens of millions of people, has stopped its activity.
At the moment there's a pursuit of spheres of influence and leadership in the darknet between the groups, providing similar services. Thus, soon we'll learn about the new Hydra head, which will grow in place of a “chopped” one.
TokenScope Team is working on the next big research of the Hydra marketplace, so stay tuned to know more.
