Archetyp Market

Archetyp or Archetyp market was a darknet market that was launched in May 2020.^[4] It operated on the Tor network and was therefore only accessible via a specialized browser. All transactions were conducted using Monero, a cryptocurrency designed to be private.^[5] Archetyp only accepted drug-related listings.^[6][7]

Archetyp

Type of site	Darknet market
Available in	English
Owner	ASNT[1], later identified as Marc Hegemeister[2]
URL	archetyp.cc (defunct) 4pt4axjgzmm4ibmxplfiuvopxzf775e5bqseyllafcecryfthdupjwyd.onion (Accessing link help) (defunct)
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required
Users	612,000[3]
Launched	May 2020
Current status	Seized

It was seized in June 2025.^[8][9][10]

History

In an interview with German website tarnkappe.info [de], the founder of the market stated that they grew up in a deprived area and first encountered drugs at a young age. After trying LSD at age 20, they reflected on their life of alcohol abuse and drug-related anti-social behavior and realized that it did not fit with the social good they had wanted to do as a child. They were impressed by the libertarian philosophy of the Silk Road website and, after seeing that many of the markets which replaced it were more focused on profit than this philosophy, decided to set up their own to support the European drug scene and advocate drug liberalization.^[11][12]

At the May 2023 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, researchers presented an onion service popularity estimation algorithm which found that, after accounting for phishing sites, Archetyp Market was the most popular onion service website on Tor.^[13]

According to a February 2024 study in the journal International Criminal Justice Review, most of the users of the previously-popular darknet market Flugsvamp migrated to Archetyp following security issues and allegations of fraud at Flugsvamp.^[14]

Research by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales found that Archetyp was the largest of the 11 darknet markets monitored in May 2024 by number of listings, with an average of 8,607.^[15] This was up from January 2024, when Archetyp came fourth after Incognito, Bohemia and Nemesis (which all closed before May).^[16]

Seizure

Archetyp was seized by the BKA in June 2025 in an operation called Operation Deep Sentinel.^[8][9]

Marc Hegemeister^[17], a 30-year-old German national, was arrested in Barcelona on June 11th.^[18] He is accused of being ASNT. The server infrastructure was hosted in a data center in the Netherlands and was also seized.^[3]

One moderator and six of the top vendors on the platform were also arrested and assets worth 7.8 million euros were seized in the process.^[3]

The onion site and the clear-net site were both replaced with a seizure banner that links to the operation's website. That site hosts a video addressed to the "underground economy".^[3]

At the time of the seizure, the total trade volume exceeded 250 million euros.^[3]