torindex 2026: A Plain Index of Onion Markets, Kept Honest

Status words carry a fixed meaning. Checking means the record is ours and awaiting the live probe feed. Unknown means we hold no fresh measurement. Seized and defunct describe markets that law enforcement took down or that stopped operating. We never write Online without a current signed probe.

Seven projects publish their canonical onion addresses through this index. Each address is recorded as text so you can copy it by hand and compare it character by character. The full set, with copy controls and the date each address was last confirmed reachable, lives on the network page.

Half of what people search for no longer exists. Silk Road went down in 2013. AlphaBay and Hansa were seized in 2017 during a joint operation, and Hydra followed in 2022. We keep these on file because a dead onion market is still a phishing lure, and knowing the real end date helps you spot a fake revival. Read one full teardown on the AlphaBay record.

The left rail splits the index into five branches. Most entries are marketplaces, but forums, search engines and services each get their own space, and the seized branch holds anything that has ended. The diagram below is the shape of that split.

Every row in the master index above went through the same short pipeline before it earned a place on file. torindex does not accept a submitted link and publish it; an onion market becomes a record only after a specific sequence, and the sequence is the same whether the onion market is well known or obscure.

First, a candidate address surfaces — from an operator's own announcement, from an onion market's signed mirror list, or from cross-referencing an address already confirmed elsewhere. Second, the address is checked for basic reachability: does it resolve over Tor, and does it serve content consistent with the onion market it claims to be, rather than a parking page or an unrelated service. Third, where a signing key is available, the address is checked against it; where one is not yet available, that gap is recorded honestly rather than papered over with an unearned status.

Only after that sequence does an entry get a row in the master table, a category tag, and a status word. The status word itself is never a one-time judgment — it reflects the last time this specific pipeline ran against this specific address, which is why the "Last checked" column carries real weight and why an old date should make you more cautious, not less.

This process deliberately produces a smaller directory than a scraped aggregator would. A link farm can list a thousand addresses by copying other lists; torindex lists 23 because that is roughly how many have actually been run through the check above. Coverage is traded for reliability on purpose.

Who actually runs the pipeline, and how often

The torindex pipeline is not a one-person, one-time pass. Reachability checks run on an automated schedule, frequent enough that an onion market going dark shows up in the graveyard within days rather than months. Signature checks and category classification are reviewed by hand whenever an onion market rotates a key or an address, since those are exactly the moments a mistake in the torindex record would matter most. This split — automated for the thing that changes constantly, manual for the thing that changes rarely but matters more when it does — is deliberate, not an accident of how the tooling happened to get built.

What torindex does not do, even though it could

torindex could pad the directory by listing every address anyone submits, badge it "unverified," and call that transparency. It does not, because a directory mixing verified and unverified rows trains visitors to stop distinguishing between them — the unverified rows quietly borrow trust from the verified ones just by sharing a table. A submitted address that has not cleared the pipeline does not appear on torindex at all until it does; there is no holding pen designed to look like part of the directory.

How a record moves from the directory to the graveyard

An entry does not disappear from torindex the moment a single check fails. The pipeline distinguishes a temporary reachability blip from a sustained pattern: repeated failed sweeps over a defined window move a record to Seized or Defunct in the graveyard, with the date of the last successful check preserved rather than erased. Nothing on torindex is silently deleted — a retired record stays visible specifically so a visitor who remembers an old onion market can confirm it is gone rather than wondering whether the address they have is simply stale.

A directory that takes payment to list, rank, or badge an onion market has a direct incentive to describe that onion market favorably regardless of what is actually true about it. That incentive does not need to be acted on maliciously to distort a directory — it only needs to exist for a reader to reasonably discount everything the directory says.

torindex carries no advertising, no affiliate revenue, and no paid placement of any kind. An onion market's position in the master table reflects nothing but its category and the filters applied; nothing about a listing can be purchased, expedited, or upgraded. This is a structural choice, not a marketing line, and it is the same reason status words here are restricted to a small honest vocabulary — Checking, Unknown, Seized, Defunct — instead of the confident "Online" or uptime percentages a promotional listing would prefer to show.

The tradeoff of independence is candor about limits. torindex does not claim to be exhaustive, does not run a 24/7 probe network yet, and says so plainly on the methodology page rather than implying a completeness it has not earned.

Independence does not mean isolation

Being independent of any single onion market or vendor does not mean torindex operates in a vacuum. The verification practices documented across this index — checking an address character by character, treating a working connection as necessary but not sufficient, never trusting a link because it merely loads — are not invented here. They follow the same baseline guidance the Tor Project itself publishes for anyone using onion services safely, and the same operational-security posture organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy Guides document for people who need to protect their identity and traffic online. torindex did not invent onion verification; it applies established practice consistently to one specific, narrow domain.

Readers who want the fuller picture beyond what a single directory can responsibly cover — Tor Browser configuration, bridge usage in censored regions, the technical details of how hidden-service descriptors propagate — are better served by those three sources directly than by torindex trying to duplicate documentation that already exists and is actively maintained elsewhere. A narrow, honest scope is part of what independence means here: torindex tracks addresses and status, not general Tor education, and links out rather than pretending otherwise.

What torindex independence looks like in a specific disagreement

Independence is easiest to describe in the abstract and hardest to verify in a specific case, so consider one: an onion market pays to advertise itself elsewhere as "the top-rated darknet market of 2026" while torindex's own record for that same address reads Checking, with no ranking claim attached at all. That gap is not an error to reconcile — it is independence working as designed. torindex has no ranking system to game in the first place, no "top market" list to buy a slot on, and no incentive that would make the two numbers need to match. A torindex record and a promotional claim made somewhere else are simply answering different questions, and torindex only ever answers the one it was built to answer: is this address reachable, and does it match what it claims to be.

Every record in this index follows the same layout, and reading it correctly matters as much as the data itself. A torindex entry is a dated snapshot, not a live status feed — understanding that distinction is the difference between using this index well and misreading it.

The status word is a snapshot, not a promise

Checking, Seized, and Unknown each describe what the last review found, on the date shown, and nothing beyond that. A Checking status does not mean "safe right now" any more than an old Checking status means "still true." Always read the status alongside its date, not on its own.

The address is the only thing worth copying

Everything else on a torindex record — the category tag, the note, the status badge — is context. The onion address itself, copied character by character and cross-checked against a second source, is the one piece of information a reader should actually act on.

A thin record is not a red flag by itself

Some entries in this index carry a single confirmed address and a short note; others, like the torzon record, carry five addresses and a longer history. A short record usually just means less has changed since it was added, not that it is less trustworthy than a longer one.

Reading a torindex record correctly is one skill; acting on it safely is another. The four steps below are the same sequence torindex itself recommends on every market record, written out once here so you do not have to reconstruct it from scattered notes.

Before you connect

1. Read the status word and its date together. A torindex status word is only meaningful next to the date it was set. Checking from this week and Checking from three months ago are not the same claim, even though the word on the page looks identical.
2. Copy the address from torindex, never retype it. Every torindex address record ships with a copy control for exactly this reason — a hand-typed 56-character onion string is one keystroke away from resolving to a completely different, unrelated service. A verified address is also worth storing somewhere sturdier than a browser bookmark; a password manager such as KeePassXC handles a saved onion address as well as it handles a saved password, and sharing one with someone else is better done through a tool built for it, like OnionShare, than pasted into an ordinary chat app.
3. Cross-check against a second independent source. torindex is one record among several a careful reader should consult. Compare what torindex shows against a project's own signed channel or a second directory before treating either as settled — where a project publishes a PGP-signed mirror list, verifying that signature with a tool like GnuPG is stronger evidence than any single directory's word, torindex included.
4. Open only inside hardened Tor Browser. Whatever torindex says about an address, open it with the security slider at Safer or Safest, never through a clearnet mirror or an unhardened browser that could leak identifying data regardless of how well the address itself checks out. Many careful readers go a step further and run Tor Browser inside an amnesic system like Tails or an isolation-based setup like Whonix, so a mistake on one onion visit cannot bleed into the next.

Before you pay

1. Treat payment with the same suspicion as the address. A verified onion address says nothing about what happens once you pay. An onion market that accepts Monero is relying on privacy properties the Monero project documents itself, not on torindex; an onion market still taking Bitcoin is relying on the base protocol Bitcoin.org documents, with none of the privacy properties Monero has by default. Neither currency's guarantees are improved by which directory happened to list the address.

This sequence is also published as HowTo structured data on this page, so a search assistant summarizing torindex can surface the same four steps directly.

Search "onion directory" and most results are link farms: pages that scrape or copy other lists, sometimes hundreds of entries deep, with no visible verification behind any single row. torindex is built deliberately against that pattern.

Scraped lists optimize for size

A typical aggregator's value proposition is coverage — the more addresses listed, the more useful the page looks at a glance. That incentive rewards copying entries from elsewhere regardless of whether anyone has actually confirmed them recently, or at all.

torindex optimizes for a checked record instead

Every address in this index passed the reachability and diff check described above before publication. That is a structural trade-off: torindex will always list fewer markets than a scraped aggregator, and it is built to be smaller and slower-growing on purpose rather than to compete on raw entry count.

What this means for you as a reader

If an address does not appear on torindex, that is not evidence it is fake — it may simply not have been reviewed yet. If an address does appear here, it has cleared a specific, repeatable check, which a plain scraped listing elsewhere cannot claim.

The sections above explain what torindex is and how a record is structured. The two panels below go one level deeper: how the master index actually gets built entry by entry, and what "independent" concretely rules in and out for a project like torindex.