Evolution Dark Web Cryptomarket Forum and Marketplace Data, 2014–2015

Hanjo D. Boekhout of Leiden University provides a structured dataset from the dark web cryptomarket Evolution, active from January 2014 to March 2015. It includes forum post contents, vendor sales counts, product categories, and a temporal weighted communication network modeling user co-posting. The data was extracted from Dark Net Market archives with efforts to resolve inherent quality issues.

Use Cases

• Analyze vendor reputation and market dynamics based on sales count data.
• Model temporal communication networks based on user co-posting in forum topics.
• Study product categorization and listing trends within an illicit marketplace.
• Train models for anomaly detection in dark web forum text based on post contents.

Strengths

• Covers a significant time period from January 2014 to March 2015.
• Includes both structured marketplace data and a longitudinal communication network.
• Data was processed to resolve quality issues inherent to raw scraped web data.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Dark Net Market archive data.

Collection Method

Extracted and processed from raw scraped webpages of the Evolution forum and marketplace.

Time Range

January 2014 to March 2015