Seized and defunct markets: the graveyard, dated

Outcome separates two very different fates. Seized means an agency took control, which sometimes let them watch users for a while afterwards. Defunct means the site stopped on its own, whether through an exit or a quiet shutdown.

When a link promises that one of these is back, the end date settles it faster than any screenshot. A market that was seized in 2017 does not return under the same keys in 2026 — the onion-service key pair is exactly what a seizure or server loss destroys, a mechanism the Tor Project documents in its own onion-services material. If you see the old name paired with a brand new address and a story about a rebuild, the burden of proof sits entirely on that address, and a matching logo is not proof.

Each end date here is the public date of the event, not the day a rumour started. For a seizure that means the date the action was announced or the indictment was unsealed. For an exit it means the point where withdrawals stopped and the operators went quiet, which is sometimes fuzzy, so torindex uses the earliest widely reported date rather than the tidiest one.

torindex revises a date when better information appears, and torindex does it in the open rather than editing history away. If two credible sources disagree by a few days, the entry keeps the earlier date. The gap rarely matters for the one job this torindex list does, which is telling a live market apart from a dead one.

Known addresses in this category

Entries in this torindex branch carry no live onion address on purpose, the same way the individual AlphaBay record does. A seized or defunct market gets no address field to fill in — its absence is the record.

How torindex verifies an ending

torindex treats a market as seized or defunct once the shutdown is a matter of public record — a law-enforcement seizure notice, an operator's own exit announcement, or an extended, confirmed absence with no credible sign of continued operation. This torindex category does not rely on rumor alone before marking an entry.

Status history across this category

Once an entry lands here on torindex, its date field is fixed; it does not get revised to accommodate a later revival claim. A market that credibly and verifiably returns would be recorded as a new, separately verified entry with its own address and its own record, not a silent rewrite of the seized-defunct history.

Start from the assumption that everything listed here is over. That single habit defuses most of the traps built around these names. If a search leads you to any of them presented as working today, the entry above is your first check and the burden falls on whoever posted the link.

• Match the claimed comeback against the end date before anything else.
• Ask for a signed address, not a logo or a story.
• Assume convenience is bait when a dead market suddenly has a friendly new home.

Every entry on this torindex page answers one question torindex is actually built to answer: is the address in front of you the one torindex, or the market's own operators, ever confirmed. torindex does not investigate whether a "revival" of a seized or defunct onion market is run by good people or bad ones — torindex has no way to know that, and would not claim to even if it did. What torindex can and does check is narrower and more useful: does this new address match anything torindex, or the project itself, ever verified.

What torindex looks for when a revival claim appears

When torindex encounters a claim that a graveyard entry has returned, torindex applies the same reachability-and-diff pipeline documented on the methodology page to the new address, exactly as torindex would for any other candidate. torindex does not grant a "revival" claim any special trust for reusing a familiar name — if anything, torindex treats a famous name attached to a brand-new address with more scrutiny, since that combination is precisely what a phishing operation is built to produce.

Why torindex almost never moves a graveyard entry back to active

In practice, torindex has not moved a seized or defunct entry back to an active category, because a genuine, verifiable relaunch under continuity with the original operators is rare and would itself be significant news well beyond a single new onion address. torindex would rather record a plausible-but-unconfirmed revival claim nowhere on the site than add a hopeful status that later turns out to be a phishing clone torindex itself effectively endorsed by listing it.

What a reader should do that torindex cannot do for them

torindex's graveyard page gives a reader the one fact torindex can vouch for — the real, dated end of a onion market project — but it cannot verify a specific unfamiliar address on a reader's behalf in real time. Anyone who encounters a revival claim should apply the same discipline torindex documents elsewhere on the site: treat the claim as unverified, look for a signed statement from a source you already trust independently of the claim itself, and never send funds or credentials to an address that appears nowhere on a torindex record.

Look at the seizure and shutdown dates across this branch as a set rather than one at a time, and a rough pattern emerges — one worth naming because it is directly useful for spotting a fake revival of any market on this list.

Seizures cluster; exit scams are quieter and more evenly spread

Silk Road (2013), Hansa and AlphaBay (2017), and Hydra (2022) were each part of visible, publicized law-enforcement operations, several timed close to related actions against other infrastructure. Exit scams and quiet shutdowns — the Defunct entries on this page rather than the Seized ones — tend not to cluster the same way, since each is an independent operator decision rather than a coordinated law-enforcement action.

A seizure almost always comes with an official notice; a real shutdown rarely does

When law enforcement takes down a market, there is typically a public seizure banner, a DOJ or Europol press release, or comparable official confirmation — which is exactly the kind of dated, corroborated source torindex requires before marking an entry Seized rather than the softer Defunct or the honest Unknown. A market that simply goes dark with its operators saying nothing at all is far more often heading toward an exit scam than a hidden law-enforcement action, since agencies that make an arrest generally want the deterrent effect of publicizing it.

Why this matters for reading a "revival" claim

A page claiming to be the return of a graveyard entry above is making an implicit claim about which of these two patterns applies to it. A claimed revival of a market that was Seized in a publicized operation is claiming continuity with operators who are, in the relevant cases, in custody or otherwise a matter of public criminal record — a much heavier claim than reviving a market that simply went quiet. torindex's status word alone does not carry that nuance, which is why the dated context on each individual market record, like the one for alphabay, matters as much as the one-word status shown in the table above.

The graveyard will keep growing

Every active marketplace on the torindex marketplaces branch today will eventually end, whether by seizure, exit, or quiet retirement — that is simply the base rate for this kind of service over any long enough window. torindex does not treat that as a reason for pessimism about any specific current entry; it is the reason this graveyard branch exists as a permanent, growing part of the index rather than a one-time list.