Darknet Giant White House Market Drops Bitcoin, Supports Monero Payments Only

The prominent darknet marketplace, White House Market, has dropped bitcoin payments and now accepts monero only. The darknet marketplace administrators detailed that there was an issue with a payment processor blocking Tor exit nodes, but the full transition to monero was always planned.

A number of crypto proponents have reported on the darknet marketplace, White House dropping bitcoin (BTC) payments in order to exclusively support monero (XMR). On December 28, one individual on Twitter wrote: “[One of the] largest darknet markets, White House Market, drops bitcoin support, now only uses monero.”

News.Bitcoin.com confirmed the payment system change by visiting the White House market’s onion URL. The White House admins detail the issues with bitcoin (BTC) support stemmed from a third party service.

“Bitcoin payments are no longer accepted,” the White House admins stressed. “The [third] party exchange API we used (Morphtoken) has suddenly decided to block access from Tor exit nodes and while this is trivial to circumvent we decided to respect their decision.”

The darknet admins added:

The Bitcoin workaround was supposed to be there just to help with the transition to XMR and as we are concerned it’s done, therefore we are now monero only, just as planned.

Monero (XMR) is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency asset released in 2014 and it leverages the open source Cryptonote protocol. XMR proponents like monero for its privacy features such as stealth addresses, ring signatures, bulletproofs, and dandelion++.

Moreover, monero has gained support across a myriad of darknet marketplaces (DNM) on the invisible web. Statistics from The 1000x Group’s darknet payments dashboard, shows that White House Market is the only DNM that is monero only.

However, in addition to crypto assets like bitcoin, litecoin, and zcash, a number of markets accept monero for payments. This includes DNMs like Darkbay, Cannazon, Darkmarket, Torrez Market, Cypher Market, Dark0de, Mega and Monopoly Market. That’s around ten DNMs that support the privacy-centric crypto asset monero (XMR) for payments.

Data shows on December 29, 2020, 36.5% of DNM vendors accepted monero for goods and services.

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