Abacus Market Link

Abacus is a large darknet marketplace that launched in early 2020 as AlphaBay. To avoid confusion with the recently revamped AlphaBay, the marketplace renamed itself Abacus and has since grown from AlphaBay. It currently has around 65,000 listings, including a large selection of medicines and pharmaceutical products. The marketplace also has an extensive digital goods section. Signing up to the Abacus marketplace is a little more complicated than some others, but it has enough features to make experienced users feel comfortable.

As well as being inspired by its original namesake, Abacus is also modelled on the old AlphaBay, which the admins describe as "the friendliest and most intuitive layout the darknet has ever seen". At the same time, they claim that the marketplace has been designed and built from scratch. Indeed, Abacus is similar to AlphaBay, but with many modern features built in, such as support for multi-sig XMR and BTC transactions, and the ability to differentiate between different levels of FE (100%, 75%, 50% and 25% payment FE'd on delivery).

Apart from the ban on fentanyl (and the usual blacklisted items), Abacus Market seems to be quite liberal in terms of what is allowed to be sold. It is one of the last major marketplaces to have a huge section for fraudulently obtained data, including personal information, credit cards and various data dumps. The marketplace also offers thousands of other digital goods, some of which are hard to find elsewhere. User support is also said to be "24/7", although we haven't had time to check this out.

Besides borrowing heavily from the template of the world's most famous darknet exchanges, Abacus has a few other problems that can't go unnoticed. For example, the captcha system it uses is relentless and can be difficult to navigate. The lack of a direct payment option (per order) is a little frustrating, as is the almost complete reliance on the traditional marketplace escrow system. It's difficult to find a provider willing to accept BTC multisig escrow, which means everyone is at the mercy of the marketplace to get it right. Apart from these problems, Abacus seems to be a perfectly good darknet marketplace, and its popularity has really taken off in the last few months.

Creating an account with Abacus Market is easy. Firstly, as explained above, make sure you are visiting an official Abacus site and not a phishing URL. The landing page will have a link to the registration page under the word 'register'.

Create a unique username that can't be associated with your online identities. Next, create a strong password of 8 or more characters (a random combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers is recommended), repeat the password and then enter a 6 character withdrawal pin (required to withdraw funds from the market).

Before you continue, make sure you save your username, password and PIN in a safe place where you can remember where they are. Once you have saved this information, enter the captcha and press "Join Abacus Market".

You will then be taken to the Mnemonic screen. Normally a 'mnemonic' is a memorable list of words, but in the case of Abacus Market it is a long string of letters and numbers. Save this along with your other information, or even somewhere else, as you will need it to recover your account if you lose access to your login details or if they are hacked.

Once you have saved your mnemonic in a safe place, tick the 'I have saved and stored my mnemonic...' box and click 'Continue'. The account creation process is now complete and you are ready to browse the market.

If you're at all familiar with AlphaBay, you'll feel right at home on the Abacus Market, as it's pretty much a direct replica of AlphaBay with a few modern additions. The Market's home screen is divided into two panels. The main panel contains the following elements

Quick search (enter a keyword to perform a site wide search)

Featured Stores (sellers who have paid for primary listing spots)

Random Listings (a selection of 8 listings to give you an idea of what the market has to offer)

Security (check the status of your security; it should be 90 or 100% if you have followed this guide)

News (market specific news published occasionally)

The smaller panel on the left provides basic information, starting with your account statistics at the top, followed by

Buyer statistics (total number of items purchased, payments made and items currently in escrow)

Autoshop (buy CC/Account details with instant delivery)

Categories (select one or more listing categories to filter)

Search options (perform a custom search)

Exchange Rates (see the exchange rates for BTC and XMR against 15 different currencies)

The Abacus Market search function allows you to filter by the following options:

Search terms, Product type (physical, digital), Price range, Category (filter by single subcategory), Origin country, Ships to, Order by (all, date, price), Payment (Escrow, FE)

In total, Abacus Market currently has around 10,000 listings spread across 5 different categories. Listings categories (and subcategories) for the market include:

Drugs (Cannabis, Stimulants, Dissociatives, Opioids, Psychedelics, Ecstasy, Prescription, Benzos, Steroids, Other drugs)

Fraud (Cards and CVV, Dumps, Drops – Bank, Bank Logins, Other Fraud Related, Other Logins, SSN / DOB / Other)

Digital Goods (Guides, Other Software, Botnets and Malware, Commercial Software, Exploits / Exploit Kits)

Counterfeit Items (Money, Jewelry, Other Forgeries)

Services (Fake Documents – Digital & Physical, Hacking, Others, Carding)

The market uses an EBay or Amazon-style system, where seller reputation is determined by buyer feedback. Clicking on a listing brings up its details, including price in BTC and XMR, shipping options, quantity available and listing details:

Before making a purchase, we recommend that you click on the seller's name to view relevant details about the seller, such as their refund policy and user ratings. Abacus imports seller ratings from other markets to help buyers get a better idea of how reliable their services are. While this can help to boost a seller's reputation, it's highly recommended that you don't rely 100% on external feedback and that you deal with sellers who have direct experience with Abacus Market whenever possible.

Be sure to check the seller's feedback on the items you want to buy, as well as their refund and reshipment policies. Although it may seem like common sense, it's worth saying that it's best to avoid sellers with less than stellar ratings whenever possible. Although an inexperienced or low-rated seller may offer the item you're looking for at a low price, it's better to avoid a bad experience on a darknet market if possible, which can be done by sticking to the top-rated sellers.

Abacus accepts two different cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR). If possible, it is preferable to use XMR, as it is harder to trace and is both cheaper and faster to send. However, for the purposes of this guide, we will show you how to make a deposit using BTC. First, hover over the "BALANCE" menu option and select "Bitcoin Balance". Here, below the "Deposit Funds" section, you will see a black box that says "Generate Bitcoin Address".

Click on the box to generate an address. This will refresh the screen and display a newly created BTC address where you will deposit coins to fund your account. Your deposit address will change every 48 hours, so if you generate an address and wait more than 2 days before making a deposit, check back to see if your address has changed. Deposits will be credited to your account after 2 confirmations, but may take up to half an hour to appear in your displayed balance.

You can also make withdrawals from this screen. Bitcoin withdrawals are processed for a reasonable fee of 0.0003 BTC.

Once you have found an item you wish to purchase, select the quantity you wish to purchase and click the Buy Now button with BTC or XMR, depending on how you wish to pay. Next, select the shipping method you wish to use, along with the payment option (Escrow or Finalise Early) and check the total payment before proceeding. You will then enter your encrypted shipping information for the seller.

If you wish to encrypt your shipping information yourself (highly recommended), you will need to import the supplier's PGP public key into your PGP client. This can be done by saving it as a text file and using the client's import function. Once you have done this, type in your delivery information as lines of text, copy it to your clipboard, and close the text file without saving the contents. Next, use your PGP client to encrypt the contents of the clipboard using the supplier's PGP key as the recipient. Paste the encrypted contents into the Shipping Info field and you're ready to go.

Once you are satisfied that your order is in order, click the Order button to deduct the amount owed from your account balance. This will alert the seller that an order is waiting for them, and they will begin to prepare the order. When the seller has shipped the order, they will mark it as such in the order status. Once you have received your order and are happy with it, release the funds held in escrow to the supplier by completing the order. Don't forget to do this, as the seller cannot be paid until you do.