Darknet sales, mostly drug related, increased to around US$2.5 billion in 2025 – and are increasingly driven by wholesale sales while the bulk of retail online sales takes place on social media.

• Darknet market sales (mostly drug-related) reached some US$2.5 billion in sales by 2025 after recovering from earlier disruptions (e.g., the dismantling of Hydra market) reflecting their resilience despite law enforcement actions.
• The structure of these markets is changing: although most transactions remain sales to the respective end users, there are indications that the value of wholesale transactions (i.e., transactions of more than US$1,000) already exceed classical retail sales on the dark web.
• At the same time, there are indications that retail purchases are increasingly shifting to social media platforms, clearly surpassing sales on the dark web.
• There are indications that sales on the darknet grew strongly between 2011 and 2020 but subsequently stabilized or declined while data from a number of national or regional studies (including Denmark, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden) suggest that retail purchases of drugs via social media have continued growing in recent years.

Additional sources:

Jakob Johan Demant, Kristoffer Magnus Bjerre Aagesen, “An Analysis of Drug Dealing via Social Media: Background Paper Commissioned by the EMCDDA,” EUDA, 2023.