On 5th May 2024, one of ASAP Market's administrators posted more information about their retirement on Dread.
The post, by /u/LeChacal:
We never get time to thank you for helping us in our smooth retirement. It was a lovely and memorable journey. Some people made crazy consipiracy theories about our retirement and none of those were true. We simply retired because we needed a break. Working with ASAP is the best thing happened for me on Darknet. Everyone in our team was honest and highly motivated. At this time, we're not planning to re-launch under the same name as well as a new name. Our team has retired. None of us are in touch with anyone. I believe everyone is enjoying the well-earned retirement. Everything sounds like a dream now.
Running a market isn't simple, its very tiring and stressful. We faced lots of challenges. If some of you remember about this incident(refer to /post/0b3875d047176101b005), it was the worst thing happened with us. Someone robbed all our funds and approx 4.6 millions were stolen at that time. We were left with nothing. Instead of pulling the plug, we paid everyone from our pockets. ASAP Market kept growing and we become one of the biggest market on the Darknet. At the time of retirement, we had around 10-12 millions in the escrow. You all know, we didn't run away with those funds, we retired with dignity as your happiness was everything for us. You can't be perfect but we tried our best to run a successful market and kept all our promisses.
The post addresses an incident that happened, on 9th August 2022, where a large undisclosed amount of crypto was stolen from the market:
Without going into graphic details of everything and without disclosing the exact amount of coins we lost in this fiasco. I only want to inform that we have lost a big amount of crypto. Most of the markets would have exitscammed after such loss but we're still here.
LeChacal reveals the amount was $4.6 million.
Much respect...wish you well and wish there were more people like you...God speed!