Darknet Market Payment Trends — Monero’s Share Across Platforms

For years, the standard assumption in darknet market analysis was that Bitcoin is the default reserve currency of the illicit ecosystem, with Monero playing a niche role for the paranoid elite. That framing is now outdated. The data from 2023 through 2025 paints a different picture: Monero is no longer an alternative—it is rapidly becoming the baseline. Understanding the mechanics of this shift, its uneven distribution across platforms, and the structural reasons behind it is essential for anyone tracking the threat landscape or researching market resilience.

The Statistical Shift: From One-Third to Nearly Half

The raw numbers are stark. According to analysis by TRM Labs and coverage of the Abacus Market collapse, nearly half of all newly launched darknet markets in 2024 accepted only Monero. This represents a sharp increase from roughly one-third in 2023. This is not an incremental creep; it is a decisive reorientation of how new platforms are architected.

The implication is simple: when a developer spins up a new marketplace in 2025, their default assumption is that Bitcoin is a liability, not a feature. This is driven by law enforcement advances in tracing Bitcoin and stablecoins, which have made transparent blockchains increasingly hostile environments for vendors and administrators alike.

Why Bitcoin Became the Weak Link

The shift away from Bitcoin is not ideological—it is forensic. Since Bitcoin’s traceability became increasingly apparent, darknet marketplaces have started adopting Monero in addition to Bitcoin, with some already moving to Monero only. The key phrase here is “in addition,” which describes the transitional phase. The end state is Monero exclusivity.

The mechanics of Bitcoin tracing are well understood by now. Chainalysis and other blockchain intelligence firms have refined heuristics that cluster addresses, map withdrawal patterns, and identify spending behavior. For a market administrator holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in escrow, the risk of a single chain analysis breakthrough exposing the entire operation is existential. This is why markets relying solely on Bitcoin are now perceived as less secure, pushing users toward Monero-only platforms that better protect against financial surveillance.

The Abacus Case Study: A Microcosm of the Trend

The lifecycle of Abacus Market offers a useful lens for examining how payment preferences interact with market operations and, ultimately, exit scams. Abacus, which rebranded from its predecessor in November 2021, became a major destination for users due to consistent uptime, support for both Monero (XMR) and Bitcoin (BTC), PGP-encrypted messaging, and a large vendor base. It survived not because of innovation but because competitors kept collapsing and their users migrated elsewhere.

What is most instructive about Abacus is the payment data. TRM Labs analysis indicates that Abacus generated nearly USD 100 million in Bitcoin-enabled sales alone. However, considering that Monero typically accounts for two-thirds to three-quarters of total darknet marketplace volume due to its privacy features, Abacus’s actual sales volume likely reached between USD 300 million and USD 400 million. Excluding Monero, analysts estimate total sales volume at that same $300 million to $400 million range over the platform’s lifetime.

This means Bitcoin—the currency most people associate with darknet transactions—represented only about a quarter to a third of Abacus’s actual intake. The heavy reliance on Monero reflects a broader trend in the darknet. This is not an edge case; this is the mainstream operational reality of a major marketplace operating in 2024 and early 2025.

What “Monero-Only” Actually Means for Users

The adoption of Monero-only models has created a trust signal within the ecosystem. In a high-risk environment where exit scams are endemic, accepting only Monero is now viewed as a marker of operational security competence. The untraceable design of Monero makes blockchain surveillance substantially harder, forcing law enforcement to rely on operational security failures rather than on-chain analysis.

There is a secondary effect as well: the difficulty of tracing XMR payments is a feature that vendors value. As noted in a 2024 report covered by Wired, vendors of high-risk categories increasingly use Monero for laundering proceeds through instant exchangers, with blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis describing Monero as “the currency of choice” for this purpose.

The result is a self-reinforcing loop. Users who value privacy migrate to Monero-only platforms. Their presence attracts privacy-conscious vendors. The market becomes more liquid in XMR. Bitcoin-only markets, by contrast, are left with a higher proportion of users who either do not understand the risks or are being tracked. This dynamic makes Bitcoin-only platforms more vulnerable to law enforcement action and exit scams, further driving users away.

The Accessibility Problem and Its Consequences

Monero’s growing popularity has not gone unnoticed by the regulated financial sector. Major exchanges like Binance and OKX have delisted Monero, making it harder for regular users to obtain the coin through traditional, Know-Your-Customer (KYC)-compliant channels.

This reduced accessibility has pushed many towards decentralized exchanges and instant swap services that bypass KYC requirements—making Monero transactions even harder to trace. While this shift limits access for casual users, it has done little to deter those operating in high-risk categories, who continue to rely on Monero for its privacy.

It is worth pausing on this dynamic. The more obstacles regulators place in front of Monero acquisition, the more users are forced into unregulated channels. These unregulated channels are precisely where financial surveillance is weakest. The net effect is that regulation has not reduced Monero use on darknet markets; it has concentrated it in precisely the channels that are most difficult to monitor.

The Escrow Vulnerability: A Payment-Specific Risk

The Abacus collapse also highlights a critical vulnerability that cuts across payment types: escrow concentration. In late June 2025, users on darkweb discussion forums began raising alarms about frozen withdrawal requests. Between June 1 and June 27, Abacus processed an average of $230,000 in daily deposits across 1,400 transactions. This is a well-documented warning sign in the darknet world: platforms that intend to exit typically begin by slowing and then blocking withdrawals, allowing escrow balances to accumulate before the final vanishing act.

The administrator, known as “Vito,” blamed a sudden flood of users migrating from Archetyp Market (which had been seized by law enforcement on June 16) and a sustained DDoS attack. Both explanations were plausible in isolation. But the community had seen this script before.

The lesson here is that Monero does not protect users from exit scams. It protects them from transactional surveillance. The escrow model—which has been a staple of darknet markets since the Silk Road era—creates a central point of failure regardless of whether the underlying currency is Bitcoin or Monero. When multisingature escrow features are disabled and withdrawals stall, users holding XMR are just as exposed as those holding BTC.

The 2024 Flooding Attack: A Stress Test

It would be remiss to discuss Monero adoption without acknowledging its underlying vulnerabilities. In March 2024, Monero was hit by a flooding attack that overloaded the network with transactions, leading to severe congestion. Some users found themselves unable to send transactions or make withdrawals from certain services. This attack surfaced vulnerabilities in Monero’s infrastructure and sparked speculation about who might be behind it and whether it was intended to deanonymize users.

For darknet market analysts, the flooding attack is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrated that Monero’s privacy guarantees do not equate to operational stability—a sustained network-level attack can freeze legitimate commerce. Second, it triggered even more focus on improving the network, which suggests that the development community is responsive to these challenges.

Researchers have also been busy. A recently published paper, Monero Traceability Heuristics: Wallet Application Bugs and the Mordinal-P2Pool Perspective, conducted a thorough analysis of Monero traceability, exploiting currently known weaknesses. The takeaway for practitioners is that Monero is not unbreachable—it is “hard to trace” rather than “impossible to trace.” Exploitable bugs in wallet applications and third-party services remain a vector for investigators.

The Forecast: Monero Share Will Keep Rising

What should we expect over the next two to three years? The current trajectory suggests that Monero’s share of newly launched markets will continue to climb. The rate of adoption is not linear—it appears to be accelerating. One-third of new markets in 2023 were Monero-only. That rose to nearly half in 2024. If this trend continues, a majority of new markets will be Monero-only by the end of 2026.

There are, however, countervailing forces. The delisting by major exchanges creates liquidity constraints that may slow adoption among less sophisticated users. But as noted earlier, this constraint pushes high-risk users toward decentralized exchanges and instant swaps, which do not generate the same forensic trail as exchange-based KYC transactions.

Another countervailing force is the possibility of a significant forensic breakthrough in Monero tracing. Academic work on Monero’s traceability is ongoing, and the TRM research demonstrates that heuristics can be effective when they exploit wallet application bugs or user operational errors. If investigators achieve a breakthrough that undermines Monero’s privacy guarantees, we may see a retreat from XMR-only models. But based on available evidence, such a breakthrough seems more likely to expose poor operational security than to break the core cryptographic protocol.

Practical Takeaways for Researchers

For those tracking the darknet ecosystem, the payment shift is not merely a curiosity—it has analytical implications that affect how you interpret market data.

• Bitcoin-only volume figures understate market size dramatically. When a platform reports BTC sales figures, you can reasonably estimate that the actual total volume is 3 to 4 times higher if the market operates a dual-currency model. Applying a two-thirds to three-quarters XMR share estimate for total volume is the standard heuristic now used by analysts.
• Monero-only markets signal a specific threat profile. A market that accepts only XMR is likely drawing vendors who prioritize operational security over convenience. These platforms are harder to disrupt through financial means and may be more resilient to law enforcement pressure.
• Watch withdrawal behavior, not just currency choice. The Abacus case shows that exit scams remain the biggest financial risk for users, crossing all cryptocurrencies. The early warning signs—withdrawal delays, disabled multisignature escrow, increased downtime, and administrative inactivity—apply equally to XMR-based platforms.
• The regulatory environment will continue to shape adoption. As major exchanges delist Monero and KYC requirements tighten, the friction of obtaining XMR may push some users toward centralized privacy coins or other alternatives. But for markets operating in high-risk categories, Monero remains the standard of proof that a platform takes anonymity seriously.

The shift to Monero across darknet marketplaces is a story about how technology adapts when law enforcement closes off easy investigative avenues. It is also a story about the limits of that adaptation—Monero cannot protect users from their own admin, and it cannot prevent network-level attacks. The market landscape of 2025-2026 will be defined less by whether platforms accept Monero, and more by how they handle the vulnerabilities that no cryptocurrency can solve: trust, centralization, and the operational security of their staff.