Online anonymous marketplaces are a relatively recent technological development that enables sellers and buyers to transact online with far stronger anonymity guarantees than are available on traditional electronic commerce platforms. This has led certain individuals to engage in transactions of illicit or illegal goods. We investigated how commerce on online anonymous marketplaces evolved after the takedown of the AlphaBay marketplace. Namely, we studied, over the summers of 2017 and 2018, a collection of market-places—Dream Market, TradeRoute, Berlusconi, and Valhalla. In this report, we present an analysis of sales, with a focus on the drug supply coming from the European Union (EU). Keeping in mind the limitations inherent to such data collection, we found that, for the period and the marketplaces considered:

The overall ecosystem appears to have (slightly) grown again since the combined takedown of the AlphaBay and Hansa marketplaces, and now exceeds EUR 750 000 euros per day. This calls into question the long-term impact of such takedowns on the overall online anonymous marketplace ecosystem.
Dream Market is overwhelmingly the dominant marketplace, and its daily volume exceeds previous numbers gathered for AlphaBay (Christin, 2017).
EU-based suppliers represent ~43% of all drug sales; this is in line with the 46% for marketplaces previously studied (Christin, 2016) in the 2011–15 period, and a marked increase compared with the roughly 25% observed in the subsequent AlphaBay study (Christin, 2017).
EU-originating drugs continued to come primarily from Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
Cannabis, cocaine and other stimulants altogether continued to represent the majority of all EU-based drug sales.
The supply of new psychoactive substances (NPS) remained modest with revenues below EUR 10 000 per day at market peak, but these slightly increased compared with our previous measurements.
As in our previous studies, marketplace vendors primarily operated in the retail space, but there was evidence of larger (bulk) sales. Volume-based discounting tended to occur, albeit at relatively modest levels.
As in our previous studies, half of the vendors specialised in one type of drug, and half of the drug sellers tended to stick to a given weight category.
Most of the trends observed in this report confirm what we had previously found for other market-places in the 2011–17 period (Christin, 2016, 2017). In other words, despite takedowns and scams, the ecosystem, as a whole, appears relatively stable over time, with the fluctuation in the European sales share noted above indicating an exception.

…we collected 35 scrapes of four markets—Dream Market, Traderoute, Valhalla, and Berlusconi Market—between summer 2017 and summer 2018.