Cebulka Darknet Market: A Technical Profile of Poland’s Long-Running Bazaar

Cebulka (literally “little onion”) has quietly persisted as one of the few remaining Polish-language darknet markets, surviving where larger international venues collapsed. Analysts track it less for headline-grabbing volume than for its longevity and the lessons it offers about regional, single-language bazaars that fly under global law-enforcement radar. This report summarizes what is publicly known about the market’s infrastructure, security model, and day-to-day operation as of mid-2024.

Background and Historical Arc

Cebulka first appeared in late 2016, advertised on Polish-language Tor forums that grew after the fall of early pioneers such as Silk Road and Abraxas. Unlike multi-continent markets that court English-speaking users, Cebulka focused on domestic buyers and vendors from the outset—an approach that insulated it from some of the churn that followed Operation Bayonet (2017) and the Empire exit-scam wave (2020). Through 2021-2023 the site cycled through three major code rewrites, moving from the classic “Silk-road clone” layout to a custom Laravel-based engine that now powers both the primary onion and the so-called “Cebulka Darknet Mirror – 1.” That mirror, reachable through a separate v3 onion, is promoted inside the market as a cold standby rather than a true load-balancer; if the main domain stalls for more than six hours, signed notifications push users to the mirror’s PGP-verified URL.

Features and Functionality

The current build (internally tagged 3.4.2) offers a stripped-down but complete feature set:

• Monero-only payments since Q1-2022, with optional BTC conversion handled on deposit
• Traditional account-wallet model; no per-order direct pay
• 2-of-3 escrow moderated by staff or, for high-volume vendors, automatic finalize-after-14-days
• Two-factor login via TOTP or PGP challenge–response
• “Stealth mode” listing option that hides product pages from non-logged-in visitors
• Built-in PGP mailbox that refuses plaintext messages longer than 200 characters
• Simple API exposing order status and balance, popular with vendors who automate dispatch

Product selection is weighted toward digital goods and domestically shipped physical items; international listings remain a minority, reflecting both user preference and perceived border risk.

Security Model and OPSEC Posture

Cebulka’s server hardening follows post-Paranoia best practice: nginx reverse proxy, MySQL on a separate box, and no remote SSH once the deployment script finishes. The market publishes a fresh canary message every Monday; the text is hashed in the onsite footer and cross-posted to Dread, giving outsiders a crude but effective way to detect silent seizure. Withdrawals require two manual signatures from staff members plus a time delay randomized between 30 and 180 minutes—an attempt to slow hot-wallet bleeding if the backend is ever compromised. Pen-test logs leaked in 2022 showed low-severity XSS in the ticket system (since patched) and no evidence of plaintext password storage, which matches the market’s claim of bcrypt + per-user salt.

User Experience and Onboarding Flow

New users land on a minimal registration page that asks only for username, password, and a withdrawal Monero address. Captcha is self-hosted (no Google hooks) and tolerable even over Tor’s slower circuits. Once inside, the layout is spartan: left-column category tree, center-panel listings, right-panel wallet. Search filters cover shipping origin, escrow type, and vendor level; there is no “sort by sales” option, a deliberate choice staff say reduces copy-cat scam accounts. Placing an order loads a short checklist—encrypt address, choose shipping option, confirm funds—then locks the coins. The process feels dated compared to modern direct-pay markets, yet feedback from Polish forums suggests the clarity is welcomed by less technical buyers.

Reputation, Dispute Resolution, and Trust Signals

Vendor levels are calculated from lifetime sales, dispute rate, and average rating, with manual flags for unusual spikes. Level-5 vendors gain early-finalize privileges but forfeit them after a single unresolved dispute. Buyers accumulate “transaction score” rather than public feedback profiles, preventing profile-linking across usernames. Disputes are handled in a ticket room visible only to the buyer, vendor, and two staff members; resolution time averages 2.3 days according to the market’s own transparency page. Independent scrapers show an overall dispute rate of 1.8 %, low compared with the 4–7 % typical on multi-venue markets that accept external vendors quickly.

Current Status and Reliability Track Record

During the broad DDoS campaigns that crippled AlphaBay-reboot and Tor2Door in late 2023, Cebulka’s primary onion stayed reachable roughly 94 % of the time, largely thanks to its low profile and modest traffic. The “Cebulka Darknet Mirror – 1” picked up the remaining six percent, so most users noticed only a brief redirect banner. Withdrawals have operated without extended pause since the BTC-to-XMR transition, and no public claim of an exit scam has surfaced. That said, volume is thin: on a random Tuesday in May 2024 the site listed 3,800 offers and processed about 60 finalized orders—numbers that would be a rounding error on bigger venues but appear sustainable for the tight-knit Polish scene.

Balanced Assessment

Cebulka demonstrates that regional, single-language markets can remain online for years by limiting scope, enforcing Monero-only payments, and maintaining a low marketing footprint. Its code is not revolutionary, yet the disciplined update cycle and transparent canary practice give users objective signals of administrative control. Downsides include thin liquidity, limited international shipping, and the ever-present risk that any centralized escrow market can disappear overnight. For Polish-speaking participants who prioritize domestic post and are comfortable with forum-style OPSEC, Cebulka currently offers a functional, if modest, venue. Observers studying darknet resilience will keep watching; the market’s next major test will likely come only when it grows large enough to attract the attention that it has, so far, skillfully avoided.