We Are Amsterdam Darknet Market: Technical Overview of Mirror 1

The darknet marketplace ecosystem has seen considerable churn since late 2021, with several long-running venues either seized (Hydra) or retiring voluntarily (White House Market). Into that vacuum stepped We Are Amsterdam (WAA), a single-vendor shop that expanded into a full market in early 2022. Mirror 1—often referenced as “WAA-1” inside Tor link lists—has become the most stable entry point for users who want to reach the market without relying on rotating captcha portals or clearnet relay sites. This article examines the technical design, operational history, and current reliability of that mirror, focusing on aspects most relevant to privacy researchers and prospective users.

Background and Early Evolution

WAA began as a PGP-signed vendor page on the now-defunct DarkMarket in 2020, specializing in EU-to-EU parcels. After DarkMarket’s takedown, the team opened a standalone .onion store—rare at the time because most sellers preferred the traffic concentration afforded by larger markets. The decision proved prescient: by controlling the entire storefront, the operators could harden the environment around their own OPSEC model rather than trust a third-party codebase. By March 2022 the site invited external vendors, rebranded as “We Are Amsterdam Market,” and launched three load-balanced mirrors, with Mirror 1 (v2.3 Tor hidden-service descriptor) advertised as the “primary” location. Historical uptime trackers show Mirror 1 hovering between 96–98 % availability, outperforming many multi-vendor competitors.

Features and Functionality

The market runs a customized fork of the open-source “Evo-legacy” engine, stripped of the wallet-less option that many users disliked on earlier markets. Core features include:

• Traditional central-wallet checkout, supporting both Bitcoin (native SegWit) and Monero (latest 0.18 branch)
• Multisig escrow (2-of-3) for BTC orders; optional “finalize-early” status for vetted vendors
• Per-message PGP encryption with automatic key-server lookup and fingerprint pinning
• Two-factor authentication via TOTP or a FIDO-like challenge signed with the user’s PGP key
• Basic support for XMR sub-addresses, allowing buyers to generate a unique receiving address per order without exposing the view key to the server
• Ajax-driven search with filterable columns (ship-from region, accepted coins, FE status, rating threshold)

Mirror 1 itself is served from a dual-stack backend: one Tor instance plus a backup running behind an anonymizing middle relay, so the hidden-service key can be rotated quickly if the guard node is DoS-targeted. The landing page publishes a fresh signed message every 24 h containing SHA-256 hashes of the vendor PGP keys, giving users an independent integrity check without relying on third-party link aggregators.

Security Model and Escrow Flow

Security researchers often criticize markets that reuse outdated Bitcoin multisig, but WAA’s implementation is reasonably modern. The buyer’s portion of the redeem script is generated client-side through a WebAssembly module; the market never sees the private key fragment. Monero orders default to ordinary escrow because true multisig on XMR still requires CLI wizardry most buyers avoid. For both coins, funds sit in a time-locked address until the buyer finalizes or a 14-day auto-finalize window expires. Disputes are handled by a three-person arbitration queue; during a dispute, the vendor’s bond (set at 0.015 BTC or equivalent XMR) is frozen, giving moderators leverage even when the final order value is small.

Mirror 1 has experimented with “partial lock” releases—shipping confirmation triggers 50 % payout, the remainder after the customer clicks “Received.” That hybrid model reduces the incentive for exit-scamming while still protecting vendors from prolonged payment holds.

User Experience and Interface Choices

The UI is deliberately minimalist: no JavaScript outside the search page, no externally loaded fonts, and a 1990s-era color scheme that loads quickly over high-latency circuits. Long-time users appreciate the absence of image carousels or chat widgets that have historically leaked IP addresses via WebRTC on other markets. New accounts are created with a 12-word mnemonic that encrypts the user’s private notes field locally; should the server disappear, order details can still be decrypted offline. One minor gripe is that Mirror 1 occasionally serves the old v2 onion address in the footer; the admins claim this is a caching artifact, but it confuses novices who copy-paste outdated links.

Reputation and Community Perception

On dread-based discussion threads, WAA’s average vendor rating hovers around 4.65/5, unusually high for a market that allows new sellers. That figure is skewed by the original Amsterdam vendor account, which still controls ~28 % of total volume. Independent scrapers show a dispute rate under 2 %, compared with 5–7 % on Tor2Door or ASAP before their respective closures. Mirror 1 has never suffered a publicly confirmed breach, but in October 2022 a phishing clone served from a typo-squat domain collected about 0.4 BTC before the team blacklisted the address in the site banner. The incident reinforced the market’s insistence on PGP-signed mirrors and encouraged widespread adoption of the “verify before deposit” habit.

Current Status and Reliability

As of mid-2024, Mirror 1 processes roughly 1,300 orders per week, with Monero representing 63 % of payment volume—evidence that privacy-focused coins continue to displace Bitcoin even on legacy-style markets. Server-side, the operators migrated to V3 onions only after the Tor Project’s deprecation deadline, avoiding the last-minute scramble that took Bohemia and others offline for days. Round-trip latency from a vanilla Tor Browser 13 session averages 2.3 s, competitive with mainstream clearnet shops running heavy CDNs. Minor outages occur during coordinated DDoS waves (typically UDP reflection attacks targeting the guard), yet the backup hidden service on Mirror 2 usually absorbs traffic within 15 min. No substantial exit-scam indicators have surfaced: hot-wallet balances remain under 25 BTC equivalent, and vendor withdrawals are processed in the next block 92 % of the time, well within industry norms.

Conclusion

Mirror 1 of We Are Amsterdam offers a technically competent, no-frills marketplace that balances modern privacy features with the familiar central-wallet workflow many buyers still prefer. Its uptime record, multisig escrow, and steady Monero adoption make it one of the more reliable venues currently accessible via Tor. Downsides include a limited search API for researchers, occasional link-rot confusion, and the inherent risk that any centralized escrow entails. Prospective users should, as always, verify PGP signatures on every mirror update, keep deposits small and short-lived, and run the market inside an amnesic environment such as Tails. For analysts tracking post-Hydra market fragmentation, WAA Mirror 1 is worth monitoring as a case study in how mid-sized, semi-exclusive bazaars are filling the vacuum left by larger, more conspicuous targets.