Silk Road's use of all of Tor, Bitcoin escrow and feedback systems would set the standard for new darknet markets for the coming years. This in turn led to political pressure from Senator Chuck Schumer on the US DEA and Department of Justice to shut it down, which they finally did in October 2013 after a lengthy investigation. In June 2011, Gawker published an article about the site, which led to 'Internet buzz' and an increase in website traffic. The first marketplace to use both Tor and Bitcoin escrow was Silk Road, founded by Ross Ulbricht under pseudonym 'Dread Pirate Roberts' in February 2011. It has been considered a 'proto-Silk Road' but the use of payment services such as PayPal and Western Union allowed law enforcement to trace payments and it was subsequently shut down by the FBI in 2012. In 2012, it was closed and several operators and users were arrested as a result of Operation Adam Bomb, a two-year investigation led by the U.S. The Farmer's Market was launched in 2006 and moved onto Tor in 2010. In the 2000s, early cybercrime and carding forums such as ShadowCrew experimented with drug wholesaling on a limited scale. Since the year 2000, some of the emerging cyber-arms industry operates online, including the Eastern European ' Cyber-arms Bazaar', trafficking in the most powerful crimeware and hacking tools. However Operation Web Tryp led to a series of website shut downs and arrests in this area. From 2003, the 'Research Chemical Mailing List' (RCML) would discuss sourcing ' Research Chemicals' from legal and grey sources as an alternative to forums such as. The Hive was featured in a Dateline NBC special called The 'X' Files in 2001, bringing the subject into public discourse. One of the better-known web-based drug forums, The Hive, launched in 1997, serving as an information sharing forum for practical drug synthesis and legal discussion. With the development and popularization of the World Wide Web and e-commerce in the 1990s, the tools to discuss or conduct illicit transactions became more widely available. By the end of the 1980s, newsgroups like alt.drugs would become online centres of drug discussion and information however, any related deals were arranged entirely off-site directly between individuals.

Though e-commerce on the dark web started around 2006, illicit goods were among the first items to be transacted using the internet, when in the early 1970s students at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the ARPANET to coordinate the purchase of cannabis.

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