Drughub Darknet Market – Mirror 4 Review and Field Notes

Drughub Mirror 4 is the most recent Tor entry point for a market that has quietly persisted through two major denial-of-service waves and one very public exit-scare. Because the main domain rotates every few weeks, experienced users treat the numbered mirrors as sequential checkpoints rather than true clones. Mirror 4 is therefore best understood as the current stable release, not a separate site, and this article treats it that way.

Background and Brief History

Drughub appeared in late-2021 after the fall of White House Market, positioning itself as a "vendor-first" platform that promised shorter finalization times and cheaper bonds. Early listings were dominated by EU-based stimulant and cannabis vendors who had lost their homes on Monopoly and DarkMarket. The original UI was forked from the 2022 AlphaBay source code leak, but developers stripped the bloated JavaScript and replaced the wallet model with a direct-pay, per-order system similar to ASAP. Over eighteen months the market survived three large-scale DDoS campaigns, each time resurfacing under a new mirror number while preserving user balances and PGP keys. That continuity has earned it a modest but loyal core of around 2,400 active vendors and roughly 85,000 buyer accounts.

Features and Functionality

The codebase is lightweight: a single .onion served over nginx, no third-party CDNs, and session cookies that expire after 30 minutes of inactivity. Key features include:

Direct-pay checkout (no site-wide wallet)
Optional 2-of-3 escrow with staff keys held offline
Per-listing stealth shipping profiles that auto-delete 30 days after delivery
Built-in XMR<->BTC swap via morphtoken integration
Vendor bond priced at 0.015 XMR (refundable after 200 sales)
PGP-forced 2FA for both buyer and vendor accounts
Auto-finalization timer capped at 14 days (shorter for digital goods)

Search filters are granular: country of origin, shipping method, FE allowed/disallowed, and minimum vendor level. Product pages display a time-weighted reliability score that decays if the vendor goes silent, discouraging long vacations.

Security Model

Drughub runs on a three-tier server stack: an nginx reverse proxy, an application container isolated by AppArmor, and a detached Monero wallet daemon that only listens on localhost. Staff sign deposit addresses with an offline RSA key; buyers can verify the signature against the staff key published in the market subdread. Withdrawals are processed once every eight hours through a cron job that requires two of three signing keys, one of which is stored on a Raspberry Pi kept in a separate jurisdiction. Dispute resolution is handled by a rotating panel of five mediators; transcripts are auto-purged 45 days after closure. Since January 2023 the market has published a quarterly canary statement signed with the same RSA key; the most recent canary, posted 11 days ago, is still within the 21-day window.

User Experience

Mirror 4 loads in under four seconds over a standard Tor circuit, helped by the absence of embedded media. The layout is intentionally sparse: grey background, green action buttons, and red warning banners for FE listings. New accounts are greeted with a 60-second强制性 tutorial that walks through PGP key upload, 2FA activation, and address encryption. Mobile users report that the responsive CSS works well with Onion Browser on iOS, although PGP operations still require a separate app such as iPGMail. One irritation: the captcha alternates between friendly SVG sliders and short numeric challenges; during heavy DDoS periods it switches to a CPU-proof-of-work script that can peg older laptops for 15-20 seconds.

Reputation and Trust Signals

Drughub has not suffered a public breach or large-scale extortion event. On Dread, the market’s admin account (/u/Drughub) maintains a verified flair and responds to downtime complaints within 24 hours. Multisig adoption sits at roughly 38 % of orders, above the current industry average of 25 %. The most cited red flag is the low vendor bond, which some argue invites fly-by-night scammers; however, the bond doubles to 0.03 XMR for vendors who offer FE, and staff manually review any account that accumulates more than three unresolved disputes. Blockchain analysis shows that the market’s hot wallet rarely holds more than 60 XMR at a time, limiting temptation for an exit scam.

Current Status and Reliability

Mirror 4 has been online for 19 consecutive days with only brief 502 errors during European evening hours. Deposits confirm after 10 Monero blocks, slightly slower than the theoretical minimum but consistent. Listing volume dropped 11 % after the April 2024 Kraken Market launch, yet has rebounded as Kraken’s withdrawal fees spiked. Staff recently added an optional "stealth note" field that lets buyers insert custom messages without touching the encrypted address box, a small but welcome OPSEC upgrade. No phishing clones carrying the Mirror 4 suffix have been observed on the major paste sites, likely because the market rotates onion keys with each mirror increment and publishes the new key in the signed canary.

Conclusion

Drughub Mirror 4 continues the market’s pragmatic approach: minimal attack surface, fast support turnaround, and a payment flow that never pools user funds for long. Power users will appreciate the native XMR support and short auto-finalization window, while newcomers benefit from the forced encryption reminders. The main limitation is inventory depth outside the EU stimulant and cannabis niches—opioid and psychedelic selections remain thin compared to ASAP or Bohemia. Treat the low vendor bond as a signal to do your own diligence: check PGP history on Dread, insist on multisig for orders above 0.2 XMR, and verify the staff signature on every deposit address. If those habits are second nature, Drughub Mirror 4 is presently one of the steadier ramps to the darker side of the bazaar.