Nexus Best Open Library
An open collection of assessments, comparisons and measurement notes on Nexus Market and the Tor marketplaces it is usually ranked against. Every entry states its criteria and its limits.
Full catalogue · Criteria · Questions · Glossary · Verified addresses · Method
Library / Criteria
Every assessment here applies the same five measures, fixed before any market is looked at. Criteria chosen after a conclusion can always be shaped to support it, which is the failure mode in most market rankings, so the order matters as much as the content.
Whether order payment is held and who is able to move it. A 2 of 3 multisig arrangement, with buyer, vendor and market each holding one key, behaves very differently from a pooled wallet the operator controls outright. This is the criterion with the largest consequence and the easiest to verify, since a market either documents the scheme or avoids naming it. The comparison is set out in full in the entry on escrow models.
Hidden services absorb floods, so the question is never whether a market goes slow. It is whether one address going slow removes the market entirely. Several addresses live at once is a structural answer, and it is observable directly because a reader can try them.
How much readable record sits behind the average seller. This is the real content of the age attribute that appears in every ranking, and it is examined separately in the entry on market longevity.
Which coins are accepted, which decides what record a purchase leaves behind permanently. A market offering a private coin leaves the choice with the buyer, and one settling only on public chains removes it whatever else it does well.
Documented process can be read, actual outcomes cannot be audited by any reader or third party. This criterion is therefore recorded and left unscored in every assessment. An analysis that scores it confidently is inventing precision, and saying so is more useful than producing a tidier table.
Interface quality, listing counts and self reported volume are either unverifiable or trivially reproduced by a copy of the site, which means they carry no information about the original. They are excluded deliberately rather than overlooked. The method page covers the limits of this approach and the relationship this library has with the market it covers most.