Short answer: White House Market (WHM) is the unusual case: a large English-language shop that announced a wind-down in 2021 and told users to withdraw. Public accounts contrast that with Empire’s 2020 silence and Abacus’s 2025 disappearance.
What directories remember
WHM launched in the late 2010s and marketed itself as privacy-first: Monero-heavy, PGP-mandatory, and — in many tellings — multisig as a normal path rather than a footnote. TorWiki’s case study uses it as the control group: not every ending is a raid or a theft.
Why the ending is taught
If operators can choose to retire and still release funds, then “the shop holds escrow” is a policy, not a law of nature. Most 2026 names we list still use traditional escrow. WHM is the citation for “it does not have to end that way,” not a promise that the next leader will copy the policy.
What it does not prove
A clean retirement does not make a market legal, safe, or worth joining. It only shows that exit and seizure are not the only two endings in the public record. Clone sites still wear the WHM name. We store no live onion for it.
See escrow systems, crypto privacy, and Empire.