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 / Questions
No single market is best in the abstract, because best depends on what is being measured. This library scores markets on five criteria that can be observed from outside, and publishes the criteria first so a reader can apply them and disagree with the conclusion.
Four things are visible from outside: whether escrow is multisig or a pooled wallet, how many addresses stay live at once, how long the market has run, and which coins it settles in. Everything beyond that is either the market describing itself or someone guessing.
It means one specific thing, which is that an order payment cannot be moved by any single party alone. It does not protect a balance parked on the market outside an active order, and it does not make a seller reliable.
They are informative but distorted. Feedback comes mostly from people whose order went unusually well or unusually badly, so an average describes the edges rather than the typical order. Read recency and how complaints were answered instead of the headline number.
Because most of them never state criteria, and because placement on many directories is purchased rather than earned. Two lists using different unstated measures will disagree and neither reader can see why.
What the current order needs and nothing more. Every account of funds lost when a market failed comes back to money that was sitting there rather than being spent.
Not safer, better evidenced. Age produces readable vendor history, which is the actual benefit. It says nothing about what happens tomorrow, and every market that failed had been running normally until it did.
It publishes verified Nexus addresses, which is a relationship worth weighing. That is stated openly rather than hidden, and the criteria are published so the same method can be applied against the conclusion reached here.
You confirm it yourself. Copy it, open it in Tor Browser, and compare the onion printed on the login screen against your address bar before typing anything. Do not take an address on trust from any site, including this one.
Try another verified address, then wait. Almost every phishing loss happens when somebody searches for a replacement address during an outage and accepts what a search result offers.
The reasoning behind these answers is set out in full across the catalogue, and the measures they rely on are listed on the criteria page.