Market News & Announcements

Starting today, we are implementing a couple changes to the vendor bond and FE vendor policies. The changes we are implementing reflect our current growth as a marketplace and the importance of having high standards to protect our community. Vendor Bonds: We are no longer waiving vendor bonds except in extreme circumstances for highly respected, long term veteran vendors. If you are a vendor and you are wondering if you will need to pay the vendor bond then the answer is yes. If you are one of the exceptions and have a verifiable and lengthy sales history, a respected name in the community and thousands of sales we would be happy to review your application for a free account. Please do not argue about this, we will just close your ticket. The vendor bond is 2.5 XMR and any vendor should easily be able to afford that. If you cant, the truth is you may not be ready to come to Dark Matter. Finalize Early Vendors: We are no longer giving FE to any new vendors except when vendors who reach Level 15 on the market. The standard for receiving FE on other markets is simply too variable, and we cant do quality control outside of Dark Matter. We find that there are simply too many relatively new FE vendors on other markets that were technically qualifying for FE on Dark Matter. By changing the qualification to ONLY reaching Level 15 on Dark Matter, we can be sure that we have complete quality control over one of the most sensitive and easily abused privileges a vendor can receive. These are big changes but they will improve our community both on the buyer and vendor side. For buyers, it will give more confidence in the vetting of vendors and more confidence when ordering on our platform. And when buyers have more confidence and comfort, vendor sales increase. These changes are effective immediately. FAQ documentation will be updated shortly. See you on the market!

Recently, we've seen an uptick in scam vendor accounts. While we do our best to simply prevent these type of bad actors from ever coming on the market, many of them will pay the vendor bond and others will have positive verifiable sales history on other markets (likely due to age old feedback padding, but its impossible to verify that). Here are some warning signs that buyers should look out for when determining of a vendor may be a scammer: 1. Abnormally short finalization time on reviews: Take a look at the vendor's reviews. Scammers will buffer their account with fake reviews from fake orders giving the impression of a history of happy customers. But under each review you can see how long the order took to finalize. Most scammers are impatient and stupid, so its common to see 24-72 hours shipping time on fake reviews. Compare this to a legitimate vendor, most reviews take close to a week or more to post. 2. Stock images for product listings: Do all the vendor's photos appear to be a generic image from a search engine? Then they probably dont really have the item they claim to. 3. Abnormally short auto finalization timer: Scammers rely on releasing escrow to get their money, and since they wont really send you the product, they will set a very short AF timer and hope you dont notice. If the AF timer is set at 2 or 3 days, be wary and be prepared to extend AF or dispute. 4. Immediately refunding disputes: Scammers dont want to get attention from market staff, so they will often immediately refund you once you dispute or threaten a dispute. If the vendor actually sent your product, they would be prepared to defend it in a dispute. If you notice any of these behavior patterns in a vendor account, open a ticket and report them!

We have updated the requirements to receive Finalize Early privileges on the market. From now on, they are as follows: 1. Reaching level 15 on the market or 2. Having FE on another superlist market* *This is up to staff discretion based on review of your account. We will only honor this for veteran vendors with many historical sales. Thank you and happy shopping!

We receive a lot of support tickets about the following 2 subjects, so we wanted to provide a system-wide news update that will hopefully assist everyone with these subjects 1. Anonymous ordering: Pay attention to your session length at login. If you are logged out during the time of ordering, you will unintentionally create an anonymous order. The easiest way to fix this is to always save the PGP signed proof of order. If you save that, you can always refer back to it and see that you ordered anonymously. If you notice your PGP signed proof of order contains a "PIN" and order URL, then you ordered anonymously. Additionally, we added very big text at the checkout process that will warn you if you are ordering anonymously. If you dont have the PGP signed proof of order, dont bother opening a ticket. The order is gone. You should just contact the vendor and ask if they can help you with it. 2. PGP key compliance: If you upload a PGP key to our system and the 2FA message is blank or returns an error that your key is invalid, then your key does not meet our requirements. Please refer to these requirements - min 3k - RSA only - separate encryption and signing subkeys - no unnecessary spacing between comments and key block (for example if you have 2 spaces, remove 1 space) Thank you and happy shopping!

We have added some new features by popular request that we believe will improve the shopping and selling experience for users and vendors: 1. Custom Auto Finalization timer for physical products - No longer is the 14 day default AF timer required for physical products. Now, its tied to the shipping option setup. When a vendor sets up their shipping option and selects the expected transit time, the AF timer will be set for +1 day greater than that time period, with a minimum of 3 days and a maximum of 30 days. For example, if a vendor has a shipping option set up for 7 days, the AF timer will be set for 8 days. 2. Extend AF Timer - previously the only way to pause the AF timer was by disputing. Now, when an order has 24 hours or less remaining on the timer an option to extend escrow will appear. Buyers can then extend escrow for an additional 7 days. 3. Clone Listings - in the past, we had issues with a few vendors abusing the clone listings feature and so we had to restrict it to a minimum vendor level. Now all vendor levels can clone their listings. This is available on the vendor dashboard in the product page. We are always working to improve your shopping experience and we really do listen and consider feedback from users regarding ways that the market experience can be optimized.

While occasionally unpleasant, disputes are a normal part of the ordering process and an integral aspect of the way we protect your money in escrow. When an order is disputed, the auto finalization timer is permanently frozen until a resolution occurs. Buyers and vendors have 5 days from the time of the dispute to resolve things themselves. If a resolution cannot be reached after 5 days, the option to "call a moderator" becomes available and at that point you can ask staff to intervene. While we do make an effort to review all disputes as part of normal operations, we prioritize and focus on disputes that have requested to "call a moderator". So, if you have an ongoing dispute that has not been resolved - call a moderator. We will get involved ASAP and get it resolved.