Latest News
Stay informed about platform updates, security announcements, new features, and important community notifications.
Platform Updates & Announcements
Transparency is one of the core values that guides everything we do at Catharsis. We believe that our users deserve to be kept fully informed about every aspect of the platform's development, security posture, and operational status. This news section serves as our primary channel for communicating important updates, from major feature releases and security audit results to routine maintenance notifications and community announcements. We publish updates regularly and encourage all users to check this page frequently to stay current with the latest developments.
All news posts published here are also distributed through our official PGP-signed communication channels, ensuring that users can verify the authenticity of every announcement. In an ecosystem where phishing and social engineering attacks are constant threats, the ability to cryptographically verify that a message genuinely comes from the Catharsis team is essential for maintaining trust and security. We will never ask you to click on external links, provide your password, or share your private keys through any communication channel — any message claiming to be from Catharsis that makes such requests should be treated as fraudulent and reported immediately.
Our development team follows an agile methodology with regular sprint cycles, allowing us to deliver meaningful improvements to the platform on a consistent schedule. Major features undergo extensive planning, development, testing, and security review before deployment, while smaller improvements and bug fixes are rolled out continuously as they are completed. This approach ensures that the platform evolves rapidly while maintaining the stability and security that our users depend on.
Catharsis Market Official Launch — Welcome to the Future of Private Commerce
We are thrilled to announce the official public launch of Catharsis Market after months of rigorous development, security auditing, and closed beta testing. Our platform has been built from the ground up with a singular focus on privacy, security, and user experience. During our extensive beta period, we worked closely with a select group of trusted users and security researchers to identify and resolve potential vulnerabilities, optimize performance, and refine every aspect of the platform interface. The result is a marketplace that we believe sets a new standard for anonymous commerce — combining military-grade encryption, a sophisticated multisignature escrow system, and an intuitive user experience that makes privacy accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical background. We invite you to explore our platform, create your anonymous account, and experience firsthand what we have built. Your feedback is invaluable to us as we continue to evolve and improve Catharsis. Welcome aboard.
Security Audit Complete — Independent Review Confirms Platform Integrity
We are proud to share the results of our latest independent security audit, conducted by a team of renowned cybersecurity professionals specializing in anonymous systems and privacy-preserving technologies. The audit covered every critical component of our infrastructure including server configuration, network architecture, application codebase, cryptographic implementations, escrow logic, and user authentication mechanisms. The auditors performed both automated scanning and manual penetration testing, attempting to identify vulnerabilities that could potentially compromise user privacy or fund security. We are pleased to report that the audit found no critical or high-severity vulnerabilities. A small number of low-severity recommendations were identified and have already been addressed in our latest deployment. The full audit report, redacted to protect operational security details, will be made available through our official communication channels. We are committed to conducting regular independent audits and maintaining the highest security standards in the industry.
Monero Multisig Integration Now Live — Enhanced Financial Privacy for All Users
Today we are excited to announce the completion of our Monero multisignature integration, bringing the same trustless escrow protection that our Bitcoin users have enjoyed to the Monero ecosystem. This has been one of our most requested features, and we are proud to deliver it after months of careful development and testing. Monero multisig operates differently from Bitcoin multisig due to the fundamental differences in the underlying cryptographic protocols, and implementing it securely required extensive research and custom development. Our implementation uses a 2-of-3 threshold signature scheme that is fully compatible with standard Monero wallets, meaning users can independently verify transactions and co-sign releases without relying on any proprietary software. Combined with Monero's built-in privacy features including ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT, this integration provides what we believe is the most private and secure transaction mechanism available on any marketplace platform today.
Platform Update v2.1 — Performance Improvements and New User Interface Elements
We have deployed Catharsis Platform Update version 2.1, which includes a comprehensive set of performance optimizations, user interface improvements, and backend enhancements designed to make your experience faster, smoother, and more enjoyable. On the performance side, we have optimized our database queries and caching layers, resulting in page load times that are up to 40% faster across all sections of the platform. The search functionality has been completely rewritten to provide more accurate and relevant results with support for advanced filtering options including price ranges, vendor ratings, shipping regions, and product categories. On the interface side, we have introduced a redesigned dashboard with improved navigation, a new notification system that keeps you informed about order updates and messages without revealing any information to potential observers, and enhanced mobile responsiveness for users accessing the platform through mobile Tor browsers. We have also expanded our vendor tools with improved analytics, bulk listing management, and streamlined order processing workflows. As always, these updates have been thoroughly tested in our staging environment and reviewed by our security team before deployment.
How We Communicate
Maintaining secure communication channels between the Catharsis team and our user community is of paramount importance. We recognize that in an environment where trust is established through cryptographic verification rather than institutional authority, the integrity of our communication infrastructure is as critical as the security of the marketplace itself. For this reason, we have established multiple redundant channels through which we disseminate official announcements, each designed to be independently verifiable.
Every official communication from the Catharsis team is accompanied by a PGP signature that can be verified using our published public key. This key has been distributed through multiple independent channels and has been cross-signed by trusted members of the privacy community to establish a web of trust. Before acting on any announcement that claims to come from Catharsis, we strongly encourage users to verify the PGP signature to confirm its authenticity. Instructions for verifying PGP signatures are available in our Resources section.
In addition to this news page, official announcements are posted to our verified accounts on privacy-respecting platforms and community forums. We intentionally avoid centralized social media platforms that track user behavior and mine personal data. Instead, we communicate through channels that respect user privacy and allow anonymous access, consistent with our core philosophy of protecting individual liberty in the digital realm.
Incident Response and Transparency
In the event of any security incident, service disruption, or other significant event that may affect our users, we are committed to providing timely, accurate, and comprehensive information about the situation. Our incident response protocol mandates that users be notified within hours of any confirmed security event, with regular updates provided as the situation develops and a full post-mortem analysis published after the incident has been resolved.
We believe that attempting to hide or minimize security incidents is not only dishonest but ultimately counterproductive. Users who are not informed about potential threats cannot take appropriate protective measures, and a platform that conceals problems inevitably loses the trust of its community. By contrast, a platform that openly acknowledges challenges and demonstrates its ability to respond effectively builds deeper trust over time. This is why we have adopted a radical transparency approach to incident communication.
Our incident response team operates around the clock and has established protocols for every category of potential security event, from DDoS attacks and server compromise attempts to phishing campaigns and social engineering attacks targeting our users. Each protocol defines specific notification triggers, communication templates, and escalation procedures that ensure a coordinated and effective response. We regularly conduct tabletop exercises and simulated incident drills to maintain the team's readiness and refine our response procedures.
Should a security incident ever require users to take immediate protective action — such as changing passwords, rotating PGP keys, or withdrawing funds — we will communicate these instructions through all available channels simultaneously, clearly describing the nature of the threat, the recommended actions, and the urgency level. All such communications will be PGP-signed to prevent attackers from exploiting the situation to distribute fraudulent instructions.
Community Participation
The strength of Catharsis lies not just in our technology but in our community. We actively encourage user participation in shaping the future direction of the platform through feedback, feature requests, and constructive criticism. Many of our most successful features were originally suggested by community members who identified needs that our development team had not anticipated. We maintain open feedback channels where users can submit suggestions, report bugs, and vote on proposed features to help us prioritize development efforts.
For users with technical expertise, we offer a bug bounty program that rewards the responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Bug bounty payouts are denominated in Monero and scaled according to the severity and impact of the reported vulnerability. We believe that incentivizing security research is one of the most effective ways to identify and fix vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by malicious actors. Our bug bounty program has already resulted in the discovery and remediation of several important issues that strengthened the overall security of the platform.
We are also exploring ways to incorporate more formal community governance mechanisms into the platform, potentially including anonymous voting on major policy decisions, community-elected dispute mediators, and decentralized reputation systems that reduce the platform's reliance on centralized trust. These initiatives are still in the early planning stages, but they reflect our long-term vision of building a truly community-owned and community-governed marketplace.