On Tuesday, officials with Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office announced Hydra’s demise, revealing in a press release that authorities had seized much of the site’s server infrastructure, as well as some 543 Bitcoin from the site—equivalent to approximately $25 million.
During its reign, Hydra was known as a hub for drug trafficking and obscuring the origins of cash, and its customers were based largely in eastern European states like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, according to the blockchain analysis firm Elliptic.
“The illegal marketplace was a Russian-language Darknet platform that had been accessible via the Tor network since at least 2015,” said German police officials in their press release Tuesday.
Granted, dark web sites do have a habit of getting resurrected—and online crime, like offline crime, will almost always spring anew in the void of what was just dismantled.