There have been a few attempts at making a viable clearnet (legal) peer-to-peer Monero market, all of which have had challenges.
Back in September 2023, there was a site called "Monero Market" that was at moneromarket.io. It lasted until May 14th, 2025. They had a decent amount of listings and struggled to get enough traction to make a profit.
I am not sure if I remember exactly how they made money, I think listings were free. Maybe it was homepage placement or featured listings that they sold? Anyway, they killed the project over saying it was too hard to make money and that they had tried everything they could.
You can still see their X.com account and the post in which they said they tried but it no longer made sense to run.
There was also another site, monero.market, it lasted from late 2024 to mid-2025. I don't remember it that well, but I assume it met a similar fate of not making enough money.
XMRBazaar is the latest attempt at a Monero market. It launched in mid-2024 and is still active. It was hyped up for a long time and seemed to cost a lot to develop, since at the time I don't think it was built heavily with AI. This site is backed by Douglas Tuman who runs MoneroTalk and Monerotopia.
Therefore, XMRBazaar is now the longest running and only still standing Monero marketplace. But it has not been easy for them, they started asking for donations to keep the project alive. Later they started allowing sponsors on their main page. Monerica was actually the 1st sponsor of the site.
But what really makes it so hard to have a successful Monero P2P marketplace? In my opinion, it comes down to four things: 1) a bad money model, 2) low demand, 3) few good merchants, 4) content moderation.
By a bad money model, I mean that it's not easy or legally clear how to hold the funds and take a cut off the transaction like an eBay does. So, if the site cannot just shave 1-5% off each transaction, then making money off it becomes very hard. That forces the site to either charge for listings, which kills many from ever getting listed, or relying on paid placement, which is a good idea but the pricing of that and the display of those is tricky.
For low demand, people will list products but do they buy them? XMRBazaar says they have over 6,000 orders, which is impressive. But they don't make it clear what actually sold. The only things I've seen are vague category charts, I don't know of any way to go and just see the things that sold. Maybe they are cash trades? I really don't understand. But, the things that get promoted are low ticket items. I just don't see enough demand for the things on there. Maybe I'm missing information but I don't see it.
Few good merchants exist. Why would someone really need to use a Monero market when they can just make their own website in a day with AI? What real advantage does it have? You can say marketing, that it's a central location. That makes sense, but in trying to buy things from the site myself, I found it very frustrating to get in contact with the merchants, even the highest rated ones. It was a really annoying buying experience and I would 100% prefer just buying a giftcard on Amazon with XMR.
Content moderation is just a huge time sink. There are constant scams, impersonations, PayPal trades, illegal content and so on. Really nothing should be able to go live without being manually approved. A Monero marketplace is not eBay where they know who you are by your credit card or address, your bank account, email and so on. If someone can sign up over Tor to try to sell a scam, they will. This is just a burden that slows down everything.
I do think it's possible to make a profitable Monero P2P marketplace, XMRBazaar is the closest thing to it. But it's not easy. As I have said, Monerica did sponsor them and I have bought things from there. But the trend is high churn on the sponsor side, it's not making a big impact so they will have to find ways to do have better paid placements, more expensive "boosted" listings if they want to grow from here.