HYDRA CRYPTO OFFLINE

Whether Hydra is really offline for good or will resurface in the near future remains an open question. вЂњPaying a couple more percent is preferable to being traced and endangering yourself.вЂќ 'Basically, you take the tracing part out of the equation,' says Vlad Cuiujuclu, an analyst at Flashpoint. But Hydra also played a significant and more global role for cybercriminals: It offered 'mixing' services designed to launder crypto and make it more difficult to trace, alongside exchange services that allowed clients to trade in the crypto proceeds from all manner of crime for Russian rubles-in some cases, even for cash bundles buried in the ground for customers to dig up later.Дue to the risk of discovery or theft, those dead-drop services charged a hefty commission-as much as 15 percent, according to Flashpoint-but that may have been worth the cost for paranoid users holding cryptocurrency connected to serious crimes. The majority of those transactions, Elliptic says, were sales of illegal drugs, which were strictly limited to Hydra's target market of former Soviet states.

In total, Hydra facilitated more than $5 billion dollars in illicit cryptocurrency transactions since it launched in 2015, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. The US treasury simultaneously imposed new sanctions on the market and more than a hundred of its cryptocurrency addresses. In doing so, they've put an end to, by some measures, the longest-running and most crowded black market in the history of the dark web, with 19,000 seller accounts and more than 17 million customer accounts, according to BKA. German law enforcement agencies announced early Tuesday morning that German federal police known as the BKA-in a joint operation with the FBI, DEA, IRS Criminal Investigations, and Homeland Security Investigations in the US-seized Hydra's Germany-based servers, shutting down the site and confiscating $25 million in bitcoins stored there. But the seizure of the Russian-language dark-web site Hydra may have ripple effects that go further than most: It represents a disruption of not just the post-Soviet world's biggest hub of online narcotics sales, but also of a cybercriminal money-laundering and cash-out service that had been used in crimes with victims across the globe. On the dark web, the takedown of yet another cryptocurrency-based black market for drugs has become almost a semiannual routine, with plenty of competitors ready to fill the shoes of any market law enforcement manages to bust.

Hydra crypto