xpost from /r/darknetnerds https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetNerds/comments/74fcyq/aero_market_launches_at_a_convenient_time/
During all the ddos attacks on Zion, TradeRoute, Tochka, etc, it looks like a new market launched at the perfect time, with a rather nice UI.
Has anyone poked around in this place at all? Their go to market strategy and execution so far has been pretty flawless. Making a couple assumptions but hear me out on the draft timeline
- AB and Hansa are seized. Buyers flock to new markets.
- Dream while still operational is being avoided more and more.
- TradeRoute, Zion, WallStreet, and Sourcery have users flocking to their markets.
- TradeRoute establishes itself well and seems to be doing a lot of business.
- Sourcery, who seems to pose the biggest threat to Aero in terms of security philosophy, multi sig requirement, is ddosed for two weeks straight.
- Sourcery struggles to gain traction, between ddos, and the fact that people don't want to learn multisig, and a poor UI (where R&D had to halt on to thwart the ddos).
- TradeRoute and Zion see more and more business.
- All markets are all ddosed for a week straight. TradeRoute and Zion are nearly unusable for 2-3 days.
- TradeRoute back STRONGER THEN EVER (https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/74ad0f/trade_route_back_stronger_than_ever/)
- Aero Market launches (https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/7482h9/market_launch_aero_marketplace/)
- The feedback on reddit seems to be outstanding (which is unusual based on the comments when TR, Zion, and Sourcery came to reddit)
A couple questions that come to mind..
- It looks like a decent amount of work went into the UI (and I assume the backend) - so assuming the size of the team is maybe double the typical market, does that open them to more vulnerabilities?
- Is my conspiracy theory about Aero Markets go to market strategy far fetched?
Thoughts??
Hi,
We're glad to see people being sceptical, it's as we would expect and actually hope, because you can't trust anyone or any market's claims. We've put a lot of work into the market and I actually contacted the subreddit Moderators personally around a year ago now when we were first starting work to get a grasp of all of the requirements for the Superlist.
This market is something we have put a lot of time and effort into and as mentioned in the announcement, we have held off from launching to ensure we can learn from past mistakes of admins, how servers were discovered and also the downfalls that can occur for vendors and buyers due to how the market functions, for example auto-encrypt, which saw a drastic outcome with the Hansa takeover.
We have timed it pretty badly with the DDOS attacks and expected to be blamed for it, but had started our approval post process with the Mods before it began and we also waited until the attacks stopped to announce, to make sure it wasn't then directed at us immediately and affected our launch. We did sustain a suspected attack not long after the announcement was posted which lasted ~1 hour, which we was able to mitigate with little to no outages, it then stopped all of a sudden.
I think the positive feedback is based mostly on our security features, enforcing 2-FA, encrypted shipping addresses, tracking details and the option for vendors to only accept encrypted messages.
Our ideals and principles towards the open trade of controlled substances are our basis for running a black market and we feel anonymity is key at this point in time to do so.
As far as our team size goes, it does not really add any extra liabilities come in to play. We're a close-knit team who have been in contact before all of this as well as taking on a few extra staff in the last year. We make a point of following specific protocols for verification of identity and certain access is only granted where it absolutely must. The bright side of a "large" team, is that it is a lot easier to handle tasks and manage the market, mainly support tickets. Whilst also having multiple developers on hand we can provide fixes to any bugs immediately.
Please feel free to contact us directly with any further questions you may have via Reddit, Aero Market or our forums.
Aero Team.