Following the seizures and shutdowns of the
AlphaBay and
Hansa markets in July 2017 as part of
Operation Bayonet, there was much speculation that Dream Market would become the predominant darknet marketplace. Formerly, Dream Market had been considered the second-largest darknet marketplace, with AlphaBay being the largest and Hansa the third-largest. Many vendors and buyers from AlphaBay and Hansa communities registered on Dream Market in the aftermath of Operation Bayonet. Rumors at the time suggested that Dream Market was under law enforcement control. At the time, Dream Market was reported to have "57,000 listings for drugs and 4,000 listings for
opioids". Dream Market administrator and prolific vendor Gal Vallerius was arrested in August 2017, after a border search of his laptop confirmed his identity as online drug dealer OxyMonster. The equivalent of US$500,000 in the
cryptocurrency Bitcoin was also discovered on this device. Vallerius is the subject of an ongoing investigation regarding large online narcotics purchases which began in February 2016. On March 24, 2019, a banner was added to the Dream Market site announcing its shutdown on April 30, 2019, with the addition that it "is transferring its services to a partner company" followed by an
.onion link. Some users believe this to be the owner's reaction to ongoing
distributed denial-of-service attacks while others doubt the credibility of the message and suspect a connection to
law enforcement,
scammers or competing
marketplaces. == Security issues ==