Darknet marketplaces will still be around long after some of the major players in this space are shut down. With AlphaBay gone, there is a huge void waiting to be filled, as neither Hansa nor Dream could make any major impact. Whether or not Aero will perform differently remains to be seen. However, the latter’s acceptance of Monero alongside Bitcoin – rather than ZCash or Dash – has a lot of people excited right now.

Aero Marketplace is a Different Breed

It is quite remarkable to see the Aero darknet marketplace team officially announcing the launch of this platform on Reddit. Even though the DNM industry is facing a lot of scrutiny from regulators and government officials, there are still a lot of people who are willing to operate such platforms right now. Moreover, there is still a big demand for DNMs as we speak, especially with all major contenders having been forcibly removed over the past few months.

Aero may be the next darknet marketplace to quickly rise to the top, depending on how things evolve. The team has, according to the Reddit post, been working on this platform for quite some time now. Their main priorities revolve around security and preventing user funds from being stolen, accounts being hacked, or the platform being compromised by government officials. All of these goals are pretty ambitious, but they also touch on how things will need to change in the DNM industry over the coming years.

In fact, Aero is not your average darknet market, but is rather a Dark Net Blackmarket, which is a bit different. With a strong focus on security and a very different user interface from more traditional markets, Aero takes things in an interesting direction. There are a lot of people working on the platform’s coding, security and design, by the looks of things.

Under the hood, Aero users are required to have a PGP key for all operations. Two-factor authentication is also enforced, which is a very smart decision. This platform is a business like any other and should be treated as such. All shipping details and tracking information on the platform also need to be encrypted by users. However, there is no auto-encryption feature on the platform itself, which is an interesting decision at this stage.  Messages themselves don’t need to be encrypted, but it would be worth looking into.

On the payments front, there are two supported currencies. Both Bitcoin and Monero are available options, even though Bitcoin is still a security liability at this stage. Monero is the only currency suited for darknet purposes, and the rest of the community needs to realize this fact sooner rather than later. To that point, Aero will strive to become a Monero-first marketplace and may potentially drop support for Bitcoin in the future. Monero will need proper multisig support before that can be considered, though.

Last but not least, there are two types of memberships right now. They will cost US$150 and US$200 respectively, which is a fair price in exchange for what users will get. With security features such as a kill switch password, ability to burn accounts, and on-screen PIN entry, Aero is poised to become the number-one DNM in the near future. A lot of future developments and new features will be introduced in the near future, as this is only the first implementation of the nascent marketplace.