We heard quite a bit of Buzz about Samsara Market mostly in context of Dream Market being shut down. Naturally out of curiosity, we decided to explore the marketplace on our own and came up with this Samsara Market review.
Alike us, you too probably have a handful of doubts regarding the marketplace, those are the exact questions we’d answer throughout this piece, which would include:
- Does Samsara Market need Registrations?
- Which Products are Available on Samsara Market?
- Who can Sell on Samsara Market?
- Is Samsara Market Secure?
- Which Cryptocurrencies does Samsara Market Accept?
- Is Samsara Market Same as the Dream Market?
Note that buying selling on Darknet Markets is illegal, we only visit these marketplaces to get a surface-level idea (of what’s presented to us) from the marketplace. We do not encourage/promote/support any activity on these Marketplaces. Do not indulge in any activity both legal and/or illegal. If you do so, it’ll completely be your own responsibility.
Let’s get started with this Samsara Market review then?
Samsara Market Overview
Isn’t it better if all of the above questions are answered in the next couple seconds? It’ll make things faster for you guys, and then obviously some of you may wish to go for a deeper insight into the marketplace:
- Website: samsaraccrn2jmin
- Products: 33267
- Registrations: Mandatory (Free)
- Security: Escrow / 2-FA / PGP / PIN
- Vendor Bond: 0.1 BTC.
- Currency: Bitcoin (BTC) only
Does Samsara Market Need Registrations?
There aren’t many marketplaces out there which let users place orders on the Darknet without registrations, and Samsara Market is no different.
Infact it’s identical to Dream Market in almost everything, even the registration form looks the same. And it does require registration in order for users to even browse the products.
Here’s a glimpse of the registration form used by Samsara:
As is evident, it’s minimum data requiring. No E-mail verifications/ invites/ payments required. Simply feed in a username, password, and a withdrawal PIN.
That’s about it. The accounts do not have a wait-period either and can be accessed as soon as a user completes the registration.
Which Products are Available on Samsara Market?
If you’ve had the least bit of DNM (Darknet Market) experience, you already know what products are sold on Samsara. Anything and everything that your local mall won’t sell and the law won’t allow can be found on Samsara Marketplace.
The product-types currently available on the marketplace are:
- Drugs
- Digital Goods
- Paraphernalia
- Services
- And Others.
The following chart would help you understand the product-distribution (quantitatively) better.
The category list does seem short, and a number of other usual categories such as Hacking, Fraud, Software, Counterfeit etc. are missing, aren’t they? Well not exactly.
Samsara Market seems to have incorporated those other categories as sub-categories under one of these primary categories. For e.g. “Digital Goods” has Software, Hacking, Fraud and most other fitting categories which for no absolute reason are listed individually on most other marketplaces.
Similarly, “Services” too offers a number of services for fake documents, Hacking, Money-related etc. under one primary category.
We haven’t talked of Drugs yet, it has exactly 12 sub-categories, and offers products such as RCs, Weight Loss, Opioids, Ecstasy and so on. It also is the category with most number of listings on the marketplace.
Even the “Other” category has as many as 500 listings, and is by far the most interesting. It offers products such as Jewellery, Defence, Lab Supplies, Electronics etc.
In a nutshell, there isn’t much a user won’t find on Samsara Market. Let’s move onto other aspects of this Samsara Market review.
Who can Sell on Samsara Market?
While Marketplaces like ElHerbalario and CharlieUK are one-admin marketplaces, Samsara Market is a lot more social and cooperative.
It allows anyone and everyone to sell on the Marketplace as long as you have a fitting product for the platform. Any user can go to the “Vendor Application” page, and apply to be a vendor.
It obviously isn’t free, the vendor bond costs 0.1 BTC. How is it a “Bond” and not a “fee”? Well that’s because the paid amount is returned once the vendor account is closed. So it’s more like a security deposit rather than a one-time fee.
The vendor accounts are probably activated instantly, and only require the 0.1 BTC to be deposited in the account once the vendor status is requested.
Is Samsara Market Secure?
As far as the code goes, we aren’t sure if it’s the exact same code as Dream Market, or coded from scratch. But as far as the security features go, it does seem pretty secure.
Anti-Scammer Measures
The two measures which protect both the vendor and buyers from being scammed are:
- Vendor transparency
- Escrow
Vendor Transparency primarily protects the buyers, and provides them with insights into the vendor’s previous records. It helps users understand a Vendor’s authenticity before placing an order with them.
The data can easily be accessed by clicking on the name of each Vendor, this is what the screen typically looks like:
As is evident, users have access to the vendor’s ratings, date of joining, and also the number of successful transactions. While we’ve seen more detailed profile-details, these are acceptable as well. Any vendor with good stats is a better option as compared to a vendor with negative, or no stats.
As for Escrow, it simply makes sure that no one on the marketplace gets scammed. It helps facilitate a trade and transaction after verifying that both parties have fulfilled their ends of the bargain.
Account Security Measures
The two factors above dealt with the human-factor on a Marketplace. But it has quite a few technical safety measures to protect user accounts as well.
For starters there’s the PGP both for account login, as well as message-encryption. This adds a firewall in addition to the password.
Then the Withdrawal PIN further makes it hard for hackers to steal funds from user-accounts. So yes it’s not Fort-Knox, but secure enough for most users.
Which Cryptocurrencies does Samsara Market Accept?
One of the last topics we’d discuss in this Samsara Market review is the accepted payment mode. The marketplace only accepts Bitcoin payments for now, but has an open community-vote to implement Monero (XMR) in the near future if the decision gets enough votes.
Also note that the marketplace isn’t “wallet-less”, and hence you can’t pay for each individual order on the order-page. Rather it uses a central wallet where all deposits go, and are then are used to make payments.
Is Samsara Market the Same as Dream Market?
If you visited even the homepage of the marketplace, you’d agree that it’s almost like a mirror into Dream Market.
Although no. Samsara Market isn’t affiliated to Dream Market in anyway. It simply uses the same interface and layout because Dream was the most popular Darknet Market before going offline permanently.
So instead of re-inventing the wheel, the marketplace simply copied what was already working. It’s not, and doesn’t claim to be the same thing as Dream Market.
Conclusion
For my final words on this Samsara Market Review, let’s summarize what we’ve discussed so far. The products are impressive quantitatively, and the Dream-like interface keeps things somewhat traditional and familiar.
If it continues to grow at its current rate, it soon will have XMR implemented among other payment methods as well.
Although I’m not a fan of central-wallet deposits, as they increase the chances of exit-scams. But then again, they can easily be circumvented if a user only deposit exactly (or negligible extras) the order-amounts in his/her wallet.
Obviously it seems like a lucrative platform even for vendors and the vendor bond too isn’t ridiculously prices + it’s refundable.
So all in all, the marketplace seems to throw a lot of green lights for now. We will come back to this Samsara Market Review couple moths later to see the growth (or decline) of the same. Till then, do drop your thoughts in the comments. Or maybe make predictions about its future?