# Nexus History Archive

> A plain chronology of Nexus Market and the marketplaces that came before it, written so you can see what changed, when it changed and why it still matters to a buyer today. Free to read, no account, nothing collected about visitors. Not a marketplace.

## Sourcing
- General milestones are ones widely reported publicly, such as the Silk Road shutdown in 2013 and the AlphaBay and Hansa operations in 2017.
- Nexus facts are limited to what the market consistently publishes: running since 2023, 2 of 3 multisig escrow, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Monero, several live onion addresses.
- No dates are invented. Where something cannot be established from outside, the entry says so.

## Periods
- [The first darknet markets, 2011 to 2015](https://nexushistory.space/era/origins): How the first generation of Tor marketplaces worked, why a single address and a pooled wallet was normal, and what the early failures taught everyone who came after.
- [Scale and seizure, 2016 to 2019](https://nexushistory.space/era/growth): The period when markets became large businesses, when coordinated takedowns began, and when multisig escrow moved from a niche idea to an expected feature.
- [Floods and rotation, 2020 to 2022](https://nexushistory.space/era/pressure): Why sustained denial of service attacks became the defining problem of this period, how address rotation became standard, and why phishing spiked alongside it.
- [The current shape of markets, 2023 to now](https://nexushistory.space/era/modern): What a marketplace is expected to offer today, where Nexus Market sits in that picture, and which problems from earlier periods are genuinely solved.

## Nexus year by year
- [Nexus Market in 2023, the first year](https://nexushistory.space/year/2023): What Nexus looked like when it launched in 2023, the design decisions it started with, and how a new market builds trust from nothing.
- [Nexus Market in 2024, building a record](https://nexushistory.space/year/2024): The year vendor histories on Nexus became deep enough to read, and what accumulated reputation actually changes for a buyer.
- [Nexus Market in 2025, settled operation](https://nexushistory.space/year/2025): How an established market behaves once the structure is proven, what changes for buyers, and where the remaining risk actually sits.
- [Nexus Market in 2026, where things stand](https://nexushistory.space/year/2026): The current state of Nexus and of Tor marketplaces generally, what has genuinely improved, and which problems remain exactly where they were.

## Threads
- [How escrow evolved from a promise to split keys](https://nexushistory.space/topic/how-escrow-evolved): The three generations of marketplace escrow, what each one fixed, and why the current design is the direct result of the previous two failing.
- [Why market addresses rotate and what it means for you](https://nexushistory.space/topic/why-addresses-rotate): The reason marketplaces run several onion addresses and change them, what stays the same when they do, and the mistake that turns rotation into a loss.
- [How private settlement went from optional to expected](https://nexushistory.space/topic/monero-adoption): Why markets moved from Bitcoin only to offering Monero, what a public ledger records permanently, and why this decision outlasts all the others.
- [What actually ended the markets that are gone](https://nexushistory.space/topic/what-ended-past-markets): The four ways marketplaces have historically ended, which was most common, and what each one meant for the people using them at the time.
- [What fifteen years of history actually teaches a buyer](https://nexushistory.space/topic/lessons-for-buyers): The handful of habits that survive every period in this archive, why they are all unglamorous, and the two mistakes that keep repeating.

## Sections
- Timeline: https://nexushistory.space/timeline
- Questions: https://nexushistory.space/faq
- Sourcing: https://nexushistory.space/about
- Verified addresses: https://nexushistory.space/links

## Verified Nexus onion addresses
- http://nexusb2l7fmqnefwphyy7m5zjhlkytlbo7qbb5lu5dlczr3azgii2gyd.onion
- http://nexusma2iegzo7atzwbrwxhcdopyri3vare2twibldnlc3txqjdeb5yd.onion
- http://nexusabcd6tyfhdwilyitaqiri6tisj2v2hueyjuj6qkvd6azvi5tuqd.onion