The Internet's largest Dark Web marketplace AlphaBay announced upcoming support for Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that recently is giving Bitcoin a running for today's most popular digital currency.

"Following the popularity of the new altcoin Ethereum and the recent price hike showing a growing interest, Alphabay has made the decision to start accepting Ethereum for marketplace listing purchases," wrote AlphaBay's admin in a forum post on Saturday, March 18.

"We are currently laying out the framework to make ETH acceptance possible, and we will enable Ethereum deposits and withdrawals starting May 1st, 2017," he added. Confirmation also came via Reddit, here.

This will be AlphaBay's third supported cryptocurrency, after the service launched with Bitcoin support, and then added Monero in August 2016.

Back in August, a week after AlphaBay added Monero support, the cryptocurrency's value rose dramatically. Before that, Monero replaced Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency of choice, used in most malware families with cryptocurrency-mining features.

Ethereum is catching up with Bitcoin

This time around, AlphaBay's decision to support Ethereum came after the cryptocurrency reached its all-time high price last week.

Ethereum price rose from around $15 on March 8 to $45 on March 17. On the same day, Ethereum overall trading beat Bitcoin overall trading by over $40 million.

Ethereum's recent popularity spike comes after the cryptocurrency implemented zkSNARKs (zero-knowledge proofs) [1, 2] a technology for anonymizing transactions, also shipped with Zcash.

Nevertheless, some users on Reddit criticized AlphaBay's decision to add Ethereum support, saying the cryptocurrency doesn't live up to the anonymity standards set up by Monero.

AlphaBay users, who engage in the trading of illegal products such as drugs, weapons, malware, and other, will surely benefit from Ethereum's addition to the marketplace.

Following AlphaBay's announcement, Ethereum trading received another spike, the currency returning to $45 per unit trading value the following day. Ethereum is currently being traded at $42.