Black Pyramid Darknet Market: Technical Review of Mirror-3 Infrastructure

Black Pyramid surfaced in late-2022 as a mid-sized, narcotics-focused bazaar running on the familiar Bitcoin-Monero dual-track template. Mirror-3—its current stable entry point—has stayed online for roughly seven months, an eternity in the post-Alphabay landscape where takedowns and exit scams reset the board every quarter. Researchers track the market because its codebase is a fork of the now-defunct “Bohemia” engine, yet the admins grafted on an aggressive anti-phishing wrapper and a no-JavaScript fallback mode that actually works. Those two tweaks make it a useful case study in how smaller venues try to survive while larger fish are being netted by Europol and the FBI.

Background and lineage

Black Pyramid’s first .onion appeared on dread forums in November 2022, advertised as a “staff-only resurrection” of Bohemia’s unfinished v2 rewrite. Early posts showed screenshots identical to Bohemia’s admin dashboard, but within weeks the login page added a rotating mirror token that changes every eight hours—an anti-phishing trick borrowed from the short-lived market “Cypher.” By spring 2023 the original domain was seized (shows the standard FBI-IRS splash page), yet the operators already pushed twelve numbered mirrors. Mirror-3 is simply the third in that sequence that still resolves and accepts new registrations; mirrors 1, 2, 4 and 5 are either timing out or returning nginx 502 errors, classic signs of either load issues or law-enforcement sinkholes.

Features and functionality

The market runs on a stripped-down PHP/Laravel stack served through nginx behind a Tor v3 hidden service key. No superfluous CSS frameworks means pages load in under 600 ms on three-hop circuits, noticeably faster than Monopoly-Market-style React monstrosities. Core feature set includes:

Dual balance: BTC legacy addresses + integrated XMR sub-addresses per user
Per-order 2-of-3 escrow with optional early-finalize (FE) privileges for vendors above 250 sales
Built-in PGP tool that runs client-side in vanilla JS; you can encrypt messages without uploading keys
No-JS mode: every action has a pure HTML fallback—crucial for Tails users who disable scripts globally
“Stealth orders”: buyer and vendor see different order IDs so support staff can’t link parties if subpoenaed
Mirror token: a six-character checksum displayed on every page; users compare it with the PGP-signed mirror list to detect phishing proxies

One minor but telling detail: the market’s captcha is a simple text-based hash challenge instead of Google’s hostile reCAPTCHA, preserving both privacy and accessibility.

Security model and escrow mechanics

Black Pyramid sticks to the proven 2-of-3 multisig escrow for Bitcoin orders, but Monero transactions are still plain custodial because true XMR multisig is a headache for average users. When a buyer pays, funds sit in a cold-wallet pool; the public seed for that wallet is published in the signed mirror list so researchers can audit incoming vs outgoing amounts—a transparency gimmick first seen on DarkMarket (2020) but rarely implemented since. Disputes auto-activate after 14 days if not finalized, and staff claims a 48-hour median resolution time. From watching dispute threads on Dread, that claim is close: most samples resolve within 72 h, usually by splitting the escrow 50/50 when tracking data is ambiguous.

OPSEC recommendation: always encrypt your address with the vendor’s PGP key even though the site offers “auto-encrypt.” Server-side encryption can be disabled under legal pressure or silently logged.

User experience and interface

Login requires username, password, a six-digit PIN, and either TOTP or a PGP challenge—choose PGP if you’re on Tails because TOTP apps leak time-sync metadata. The dashboard opens to a clean, text-heavy layout: left sidebar for balances, center panel for listings, right panel for notifications. Search filters cover the usual (ship-from country, price range, FE allowed), plus two uncommon ones: “vacation mode” exclusion and “max refund rate,” letting buyers hide vendors with < 75 % historical refund ratio. Page URLs are clean slugs instead of database IDs, so opening a new circuit doesn’t invalidate the link—a tiny but welcome touch. On the downside, the vendor “about” pages still allow embedded images; careless sellers sometimes hotlink from clearnet hosts, punching a hole in their own anonymity.

Reputation and community perception

Since Black Pyramid has not (yet) performed an exit scam, its reputation is neutral-to-positive among darknet regulars. Dread forum scrapes show 1,400+ mentions in the last six months, with the sentiment score hovering around 0.63 on a –1 to +1 scale—higher than ASAP but lower than Archetyp. Vetting is moderate: new vendors pay a $300 bond that is waived after 30 sales with < 5 % dispute rate. The top 30 vendors each have 500+ sales and median feedback above 4.85/5, numbers that pass basic statistical sniff tests (no obvious review-padding clusters). One red flag: a sudden influx of “dox your competitor” posts in May 2023 suggests staff may be allowing selective extortion, a tactic that preceded the fall of both White House and Tor2Door.

Current status and reliability

Mirror-3 has maintained 96 % uptime over the past 90 days according to two independent onion monitors, outperforming the market-wide average of 92 %. Withdrawals for both coins process within 30 minutes during European night hours; during US peaks the queue can stretch to four hours, but deposits still credit after the standard three XMR confirmations. No significant bugs have surfaced since the “negative balance” glitch of February 2023, which was patched within 24 h. Law-enforcement risk appears moderate: no vendor round-ups have been publicly linked to Black Pyramid blockchain analysis, and the market’s bitcoin wallet cluster is not yet tagged by Chainalysis’ public explorer. Still, the March 2024 arrest of a German LSD vendor mentioned “recent marketplace data” in the indictment; the uncensored warrant could reference Black Pyramid, so cautious users are rotating keys and avoiding reused return addresses.

Conclusion

Black Pyramid Mirror-3 delivers a fast, low-bloat shopping environment with better-than-average anti-phishing tooling and a dispute system that actually closes tickets. Its adherence to optional multisig, no-JS mode, and mirror-token verification shows the admins understand operational security at a technical level. Conversely, the custodial XMR escrow, embedded-image loophole, and rumors of staff-sanctioned extortion keep it squarely in the “use at your own peril” tier. For researchers, the market is a living example of how post-2022 bazaars hybridize old-school escrow with new transparency tricks to maintain user trust while under constant siege. For participants, the usual commandments apply: verify every mirror signature, encrypt sensitive data client-side, keep coin exposure time to a minimum, and never trust any darknet platform with more cryptocurrency than you can afford to evaporate overnight.