Following the shutdown of Hydra, the forum affiliated with it also stopped working, and former users of the site, among whom were both buyers and employees of the marketplace, rushed to another resource positioning itself as the main darknet forum in Russia. Almost immediately after the fall of Hydra, the founders of the site began to receive offers to sell it, the authors of reputable Telegram channels dedicated to the consumption of prohibited substances tell with reference to their own sources.
“We have decided to sell the forum to interested parties. I won’t say which one yet. I can describe them like this: these are incompetent people who are highly likely to ruin the forum. By this I mean that he will lose the vector for security, anonymity, qualified service,” the deputy administrator with the nickname WD wrote in the closed part of the forum.
The sale of a large forum on the darknet is always an event for two reasons.
Firstly, the inhabitants of the shadow segment of the Internet have much fewer ways to communicate with each other. Many of them are engaged in illegal business, so they are afraid to use ordinary social networks and messengers. For many darknet users, forums become almost the only opportunity to contact each other, find employees or business partners. The second reason is due to the fact that a large darknet forum is an invaluable database. At such sites, many participants of shadow markets are gathered literally in one place, which gives the owners of the resource the opportunity to sell advertising on the site for a lot of money.