[Andromeda] Andromeda Market Updates

Hi everyone, this is my first post on this website. Andromeda is a market that was created by some admins from another market that closed, DarkBay, specifically myself and two others. LostTemple (The DarkBay owner) helped a lot with our security auditing, and we created a site where security was paramount, had a usable interface and took great precaution at making sure the servers and the Bitcoin payments were secured against theft. We are extremely confident that Andromeda is a very secure market with regards to transactions and the anonymity of the servers, but don't take our word, we welcome all security testing. We recently upgraded the servers to make the market run faster and improved our uptime (As claimed on DNStats.net) from 85% to 95%. The rest I think is partially because of the Tor Network, and we have had ongoing DDoS attacks that seem to spring up randomly, then die down (Not sure why we were targeted specifically, no threats or blackmail was sent to our team). DarkBay was running from January to May when LostTemple wanted to close the market, we decided collectively to continue on a new market without him, that led to the creation of Andromeda. We've surpassed DarkBay's total transactions several times over since opening in April.

I wanted to share some information about Andromeda:

Andromeda is extremely proactive at locating and banning scammers, we won't be the middleman for vendor scams. We have contacted other market admins and investigated vendors before, and we are not easily fooled. Ask mbforlow or GeGunz, they didn't manage to pull off their macbook and firearm scams respectively, and buyers were both refunded the full amount. Low vendor costs, only around 20 USD or 0.045 BTC. We need to have a cost to prevent scammers easily signing up repeatedly, but not too high to outcast small time vendors. If you are an established vendor (term open to interpretation), or have done honest business on other markets, we would love to offer you a free vendor registration and access to all our services, in return that you sell your products on our marketplace. Vendors can only request FE with explicit permission from the admins.

Auto-finalize for all orders is active, BTC released to vendor after 2 weeks from marked shipped. Buyer and vendor have opportunity to cancel auto-finalize countdown after 7 days from shipped. Order is completely erased 4 weeks after marked complete. If no feedback is left, positive feedback is automatically left for the vendor, to prevent buyers forgetting and never returning. Withdrawals are instant, there is no delay (you just need 3 confirmation before sending). No withdrawal or deposit fees. In fact no need to deposit at all, market wallets are only for vendor payments waiting to be withdrawn. Buyers deposit straight into escrow reducing the potential attack vectors. Fee for orders is 4% and deducted after buyer has finalized, as funds are sent to vendor.

Fast support, we always get back to people quickly and we use a ticket system where you can chat with the admins. The only way we can prove we are responsive is if you have an issue, contact us. No one has waited more than 1 day for a response, and you can also PM the admins directly for more serious situations. If you ask vendors, I do not think you will find anyone who has had a bad experience with Andromeda (except maybe the users we banned for scamming).

Multi-sig is active (in beta mode), available for premium vendors to enable. Will stay in beta for possibly another 2 weeks until we have fully tested and made sure there are no holes, then the option will appear for all vendors on around June 10th. We want to transition all transactions from escrow to multi-sig eventually, ideally by the end of June.

Code built 100% from scratch, no external framework or plugins, or JS. We hard coded the whole site and designed the whole interface from the ground up. No BitWasp (Some people sent us hateful messages claiming we were BitWasp but this is not true, please feel free to verify). We recognize the importance of an interface that looks usable. Vendors spend a lot of time on markets (almost as much as the admins, or more...) so we need to create a good experience for them so they can conduct their business swiftly.

2FA was working, but we had an issue with the library, it will be up and running again soon. Internal encryption for all messages (PGP still strongly recommended) and all messages are auto deleted after 7 days. We want to keep the servers as clean as possible. In the worst case scenario the hacker would only gain 7 days worth of information. The backups are also erased regularly. Andromeda wants to exist as much as possible like a Ghost, and we will continue to add mechanisms to delete personal information from our servers, we only keep what's absolutely necessary. OPSEC is the user's responsibility, but Andromeda must do everything we can to protect our users and their information. We are not Google. We destroy as much as possible and we don't share with the NSA.

Andromeda has a lot of great vendors and products. Some of the newest vendors are TurtleTime, SeedsCo, BubBoss, StealthInc, FreeRide, DrugsInc, MDMAMan, dutchquality1256, LetsSellDrugs, Gex, lafloche, BudsBuds, sunshinemart, Omnix, aussiequality, MellowYellow, IdealPills, Bungee54, passman, kwikeemart topnotch and 493 other vendors. In total Andromeda has 18307 users at time of posting, some merged from DarkBay Market.

What we are considering for making regular escrow better:

The private key to the escrow is given to both the vendor and the buyer during the order, but encrypted using both of their PGP keys. So the escrow BTC can be collected even if Andromeda goes down, so long as buyer and vendor cooperate outside the market. This is still being discussed and we are trying to determine if this is plausible. If we keep escrow as an option, we may experiment with this.

What we want for the future:

Andromeda wants to create a highly usable market, adopts new technologies and build a DNM that people want to use. Full multi-sig integration will be a big step we believe. Andromeda doesn't want to be too big, because that leads into a host of other problems. We may not be as professional as TMP, as big or Agora or CannabisRoad, but we listen to our users and make changes, we try to be better, and I think we are making good improvements.

Andromeda Market http://andromedam363aux.onion

Old Andromeda Forums http://andromedam363aux.onion/forums.php

New Andromeda Forums http://dvzuhtlteonn6mwd.onion

Thanks for your time


Comments


[1 Points] GrandWizardsLair:

Looks nice: it's a pity it isn't taking my PIN, as I just added some clonotrils. Hopefully we can get this resolved shortly and I'll be setting up shop on one of the nicer-looking new marketplaces out there.