Plain-English answers to the questions visitors ask about our best-Tor-markets shortlist.
There isn't a single “best” market for every use case. Every entry on the shortlist earned its spot in a specific category, best overall, best for Canada, best for multi-coin payments, best for resilience, best for first-time buyers, best for a clean modern UI. Pick the one that matches your priorities; all of them clear the same baseline checkpoints.
Five checkpoints: (1) PGP-signed mirror announcements on a community forum, (2) anti-phishing surface that prints the canonical onion on every page, (3) Monero supported, (4) standard multi-vendor escrow with published dispute policy, (5) at least 90 days of continuous uptime through the mirror pool. A market on this list passed all five and keeps passing them.
The bar is deliberately high. Dozens of Tor markets are reachable on any given day; very few survive the checkpoint flow above. This is a recommendation list, not an A–Z catalog of everything that exists.
All of them. We don't recommend Bitcoin-only markets, the bar to make this shortlist requires XMR support. Bitcoin is also accepted on most entries for vendor compatibility, but Monero is the privacy default.
Compare the full 56-character v3 onion you typed with (a) the address printed in the market's PGP-signed mirror announcement on Dread, and (b) the URL banner the market itself prints in its page header. All three must match before you log in.
Treat clearnet mirrors as redirectors at best. The canonical entry for every market on this list is its v3 onion. If a clearnet mirror prints a different onion than what the market shows in its own header, do not log in.
Bitcoin: 1–2 confirmations, ~10–30 min on a healthy mempool. Monero: ~10 blocks, around 20 min. Larger amounts may take more confirmations.
No. The shortlist is independent, ad-free, has no referral links, and has no commercial relationship with any market listed. See How We Pick for the full disclosure.
