About this archive and how it is sourced

What this archive covers, where the history comes from, and what it deliberately refuses to claim.

What is here

A chronology of Tor marketplaces from the first generation through to the current one, organised by period and by year rather than as a pile of unconnected articles. The point of ordering it this way is that the current design only makes sense once you can see what it was reacting to.

How it is sourced

• General milestones are ones that were widely reported publicly at the time, such as the Silk Road shutdown in 2013 and the AlphaBay and Hansa operations in 2017.
• Facts about Nexus are limited to what the market consistently publishes about itself, which is that it has run since 2023, holds orders in 2 of 3 multisig escrow, settles in Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero, and keeps several onion addresses live.
• Where a date or an internal detail cannot be established from outside, no date is invented. The entry describes the pattern instead and says that is what it is doing.

What this archive does not claim

It does not claim any market is safe, now or later. Every market that ever failed was operating normally the day before it did, and history is useful for evaluating structure rather than for predicting outcomes. It also does not present internal dispute outcomes as knowable, because no reader or third party can audit those.

The relationship with the subject

This archive publishes verified Nexus addresses, which is a relationship worth weighing when reading anything it says about Nexus. Stating that plainly is more useful than claiming a neutrality that could not be checked. Everything factual here is either publicly reported or something you can verify yourself, and the verification step for the addresses is described on the addresses page.

Corrections

Entries get revised when the picture changes. The aim is a record that stays accurate rather than one that stays flattering, and where a revision changes a conclusion, the change is described rather than quietly applied.

Verified addresses referenced in this archive

Open these in Tor Browser only. Before typing a password, compare the onion printed on the login screen against your address bar. If they do not match, close the tab.