What is Kilos?
Kilos offers unique services on the darknet: It functions as a market-focused search engine and provides various services such as a bitcoin mixer. If the market site is up, you can find the onion link for Kilos to the right of this article.
The search engine is the main purpose of the site and it is not just a simple darknet search engine, but it explicitly searches on trusted market and vendor shop sites for your search term. This means you can use Kilos to search a wide variety of darknet markets and vendor shops when looking for a specific product. So if you can’t find what you need on your favorite darknet market site, try searching for it on Kilos and you might get lucky.
Kilos also offers additional services. The biggest being the chipmixer “Krumble”. If you’re new to the darknet market scene, a bitcoin mixer is a tool that you can use to anonymize your bitcoins. By using a mixer like Krumble, the companies you buy your bitcoins from cannot trace where your coins end up, and this prevents them from reporting you to the authorities for buying drugs.
In the past, bitcoin mixers have fallen for the common trap (which so many darknet markets also fall for) of not enforcing security for their users properly. In the same way that a customer failing to encrypt their address places the vendor at risk, the mixers of old placed their customers at risk by not enforcing security procedures.
Krumble randomizes transaction fees (on the bitcoin network), commission fees (inside of Krumble), and enforces a randomized transaction delay to increase anonymity. The more coins that are currently being tumbled, the more anonymous each user of Krumble is.
Krumble also operates only over Tor, unlike some of the more well-known coin mixing companies, and by doing so it places itself out of reach from “know your customer” (KYC) regulations that could force us to deanonymize your transaction.
And on top of the search engine and bitcoin mixer you can also use the site for image and file hosting, though you are not allowed to upload pornography. Also, Kilos offers some social platforms such as a live chat and even provides a arrest canary page so that you can always be sure that the site is not compromised.
Krumble Tips
Krumble does most of the work for you, but there are some steps you can take to make your transactions even more anonymous.
If you need to send more than 0.1 BTC, do it in several mixes. The majority of transactions on darknet markets are for less than 0.1 BTC, and by making your payout values look indistinguishable from everybody else’s, you increase your anonymity.
Instead of mixing large batches of coins at once, mix them slowly. The more delay you add to the mixing process and subsequent spending, the bigger your anonymity set amongst other users of the mixer.
Note however that a chipmixer is not any more effective than a privacy currency like Monero. Any mixer that tells you it can make your bitcoins more anonymous than Monero is lying to you, and that is simply the end of the matter. Bitcoin was built with a public ledger in mind, and thus it has a limit of anonymity that is inherently lower than a coin built for privacy like Monero. However, the majority of transactions on the darknet markets take place using BTC, with only a small minority using XMR. Because of this sad reality, services like Krumble are both necessary and effective at what they do.
The transaction fee is randomized between 3% and 4.75% for each transaction. While it is possible to keep submitting mixes until you get a favorable fee percentage, we strongly recommend against doing this. Reducing the entropy of the mixing process makes anonymity weaker not just for you, but for everybody else, by making Krumble transactions more easily identifiable.
Security Recommendations
Same as with all darknet sites the usual security recommendations apply. Most importantly: stay anonymous. Use the TOR browser only and don’t use the TOR browser for any regular (non-darknet) browsing.
Before visiting the site with the TOR browser, you should switch off JavaScript (Options -> Privacy & Security -> Security Level -> Switch to “Safest”). Kilos is explicitly designed so that you don’t need JavaScript which allows you to increase your security by switching it off.
Ideally, you have a dedicated system or at least a dedicated VM for all your darknet activities. Keep your darknet PGP keys and other credentials limited to that system only, do not mix it with any activities that would expose your identity.
Treat your dedicated system like a work-system: Only install the software necessary for your operations do not install anything for entertainment or other purposes. Subsequently, resist the urge to browse Twitter, Reddit, or any other social media sites while you have downtime. For this always use your regular system.
For additional system security, we recommend you run a secure operating system like Tails or Whonix on your dedicated system for darknet activities. We also recommend using a VPN as an additional security measure since TOR will only anonymize your browsing sessions but not other traffic.
Especially when using any public WiFi hotspots you should always use a VPN when accessing the Internet since you don’t know whether the access point is compromised. A VPN ensures that all of your traffic, no matter what application, will always be strongly encrypted when passing the access point, this protecting yourself not only from eavesdropping but also possible identity theft.
Kilos Summary
Kilos is the first site you should go to when searching for a specific product on the darknet. Not only because it may find products that you wouldn’t find by normal market browsing but also because it can make it easier to find the cheapest price for any given product. Additionally, you can use the chipmixer to increase your security, so Kilos is a site that should always be in your darknet bookmarks. As always, when visiting any darknet market make sure to only use trusted links, such as the onion link for Kilos on the top right.