Russia's Largest Darknet Market Is Hawking an ICO to Fund Global Expansion

Hydra, reportedly the largest darknet marketplace serving Russia and neighboring countries, claims it is seeking to raise $146 million through a token sale to fund a worldwide expansion.

A "Package" of 100 tokens will provide a buyer with a 0.00333333 percent share of Hydra's profit, the memorandum says.

Given the illicit nature of its business, Hydra's token offering may be the most brazen ever, even compared to the ICOs that pushed the envelope of U.S. registration requirements in 2017.

Boasting proficiency in security and attack resilience, the team behind Hydra says it wants to introduce the rest of the world to its "Contact-free" method of trading contraband, in which the buyer, seller and courier never meet.

Hydra is planning to issue 1,470,000 tokens representing 49 percent of the new project and promising $500 monthly dividends in bitcoin for each token if the buyers get more than 100.That means Hydra operators are expecting Eternos to generate over $15 million monthly.

Hydra opened in 2015, providing a marketplace for illegal goods such as drugs and their ingredients, counterfeit documents and money, and hacking services.

According to the Russian investigative outlet The Project, Hydra's user base exceeds 2.5 million accounts, 393,000 of which have made at least one purchase.

According to Hydra itself, the number of users exceeds three million, and they make over 100,000 deals every day, trading Colombian cocaine, home-grown cannabis, fake passports, stolen official databases and cash in exchange for BTC.Purchases at Hydra are paid for in bitcoin or electronic money transfers, like at the oldest illegal marketplace Silk Road, whose founder Ross Ulbricht is serving a life sentence in the U.S. However, unlike at Silk Road, Hydra buyers don't get prohibited goods delivered by mail but rather hidden in secret locations around the cities where they live.

The Project estimated that since 2016, users have spent over $1 billion on Hydra.

According to its jobs page, Hydra is hiring its own chemists to check the quality of the drugs sold on the marketplace.