Hydra Server's Caretaker Paid In Crypto

Russian investigators have frozen and confiscated 649 million rubles worth of cryptocurrency from the digital wallets of Dmitry Pavlov, the 35-year-old self-described caretaker of the the notorious Hydra darknet marketplace.

According to documents revealed in court and reported by a Russian local media outlet, law enforcement officers had acted swiftly to freeze and seize the assets from Pavlov's crypto wallet.

Pavlov, who stands accused of operating and maintaining the critical server infrastructure that kept Hydra running, testified that he received his crypto holdings as a form of “salary and bonuses” for his technical services.

Prosecution officials detailed that the criminal ring behind Hydra paid Pavlov more than 15 million rubles per year in cryptocurrency for running the website.

However, Pavlod admitted that he deliberately didn't convert his earnings into cash, but instead chose to hold onto the digital assets hoping that the value of the crypto in his wallet would increase overtime.

In addition to crypto payments, Hydra’s operators reportedly supplied Pavlov with cash to cover ongoing maintenance costs for the servers.

Hydra's Co-founders Take Home 100 Billion Rubles Every year

Prosecutors revealed that couriers would periodically deliver bags of cash directly to Pavlov, containing monthly pocketmoney to cover rents and maintaining fees. The value of the cash delivered to Pavlov every month is estimated to be between 1.5 to 2 million rubles.

The legal proceedings have shed new light on the vast financial scale of Hydra’s operations. Last December, a branch of the Moscow District Court sentenced 16 individuals for their roles in orchestrating the marketplace.

The operation’s mastermind, Stanislav Moiseev, received a life sentence after evidence showed that Hydra facilitated over $5 billion in cryptocurrency transactions during its years of operation.

Prosecutors cited Chainalysis estimates to corroborate the staggering size of Hydra’s crypto turnover.

At Pavlov’s trial, a representative from Rosfinmonitoring—Russia’s top anti-money laundering agency—testified that Hydra’s annual turnover at the time of its closure was $1.7 billion.

The platform reportedly took a 2% to 5% commission from each crypto transaction processed through its system.

Another expert witness claimed that, when factoring in related services, the net profit for Hydra’s co-founders alone reached about 100 billion rubles per year.

While the global darknet crypto revenues have seen a drastic 15% drop in 2024, Russia's darknet market scene has recorded a dramatic 68% increase in crypto transactions.

The case against Pavlov and his associates underscores the persistent challenges faced by law enforcement in combating the financial infrastructure that supports large-scale cybercrime, even as authorities continue to score major victories against the architects of the digital underworld.