XMR-only White House Market admin announces graceful exit on Dread

White House Market¹ admin Mr. White² has announced their upcoming voluntary retirement in a GPG-signed message posted on Dread³:

We have reached our goal and now, according to plan, it’s time to for us to retire.

We will keep the market online for a limited time until open orders are finalized, disputes handled and coins withdrawn. We don’t know how long that will take but don’t expect to come back 6 months from now and find the market up.

Thanks everybody for your business, trust, support and of course for placing decent amounts of money in our pockets. We may come back some time in the future with a different project or we may not. Meanwhile be on the lookout for phishing or copycats, if it’s not signed by us it’s not us.

Good luck and stay safe.

WHM is one of the few major darknet marketplaces that have actually managed to retire in a rather responsible manner.

Here are some stats⁴:

• opened 24 August 2019 (~2.5 years of activity)
• almost 900K users (300K+ active)
• ~3.5K vendors
• close to 50K listings

If and how exactly this event will impact Monero is anybody’s guess.