Two years, in public traces
The account below is assembled from public traces: directories, forum posts, and the PGP key itself. The market does not publish a changelog, so the order of events is approximate in places. Where a date is exact, it is exact because it is written in the artifact, not guessed.
2023: the key before the market
The market's PGP key was created on 2023 11 21. That date is not a guess. It is carried in the key itself, and it sits months before the first public address of the market. The operator set up verification before the market went live, not after the first complaint arrived.
It is a small detail, but it is the kind of thing that shows in the fingerprint and does not change. A market that has been using the same key for months before its launch is not one that minted a key to match today's address. The key and its fingerprint are on the verification page.
February 2024: the first address
The first public address appears in February 2024. Directories date the market from that point, and that is where the "Since Feb 2024" label comes from. It is the moment the storefront became reachable by anyone who had the address and a working Tor Browser.
The starting categories were drugs and services. Drugs is still the largest section today, and it was the largest from the start. The early growth went through Dread, and the early thread still reads like a market testing the water: users checking the address, posting a mirror, asking whether a vendor ships, complaining about a load that took too long. The market was small and loud, the way new ones are.
The additions
After the launch, the market added things over time. The sequence here is approximate, because there is no changelog to read. What appeared, in rough order: Litecoin as a third coin, walletless pay for people who do not run a wallet, the 2 of 3 escrow made explicit in how the orders work, the Autoshop for vehicles and parts, a layer of DDoS protection on the front of the site, and PGP 2-FA for accounts.
Each of these is a change you can see now but not date precisely. The market does not publish a changelog, so the order is the best reconstruction from where the features first show up in posts and in the interface. The coins and the payment flows are on the payments page.
Why addresses rotate
Addresses die for two reasons. The first is flood: competitors and censors both find a specific .onion and press on it, with traffic that does not look like buyers. The second is pressure on the node that serves it, the machine that has to keep answering at that exact address. When one of the three stops resolving, it is usually one of those two.
The operator's response is the same every time. Publish a new onion, sign the list of mirrors with the key, and let the old address go. The result is the state you see now: three live addresses and a pile of dead ones in old posts. Rotation is not a bug of this market. It is the environment, and it is why a month old list is a historical document rather than a current one.
Where it stands
Three addresses, one storefront, two years behind it. The useful measure of a market is not how new it is but how long it has survived its own users' complaints. Two years of those is the actual product. The thread where the complaints live is on the Dread page, the key that makes the addresses checkable is on the verification page, and the current set, character for character, is on the addresses page.