About torindex and why it takes no money to list you

Think of a card catalogue rather than a review site. We record where things are and whether we have confirmed them, and we leave opinions to others. There are no scores, no best-of lists, and no advertising slots. When you want a judgement about whether a market is worth your trust, that is a different kind of site than this one.

Nobody can pay to appear here, to rank higher, or to remove a seized record. There are no affiliate links and no referral cuts baked into the addresses we publish. Independence is the only asset a directory has. The moment a listing can be bought, the list stops being worth reading, so we do not sell one.

No advertising

There are no ad slots anywhere on the site.

No affiliate revenue

Outbound links are plain. We do not earn a cut on what you do next.

No paid placement

Order and inclusion follow the taxonomy, never a payment.

We are not a safety guarantee. A confirmed address means we reached it on a date, nothing more about the conduct of the market behind it. We do not run live uptime checks yet, so most status fields read checking or unknown on purpose. And we will always say seized when a market is seized, even a well known one.

None of the verification discipline here is proprietary. The habit of checking an onion address character by character, treating Tor Browser's security slider as a real safety control rather than a suggestion, and never trusting a link because it happens to load, is documented directly by the Tor Project and echoed by digital-rights groups like the EFF and privacy-focused guides like Privacy Guides. If a claim on this site ever conflicts with what those sources say about Tor itself rather than about any specific market, trust them over us on the general Tor question and hold us to account on the market-specific one — that is the correct division of authority.

Two kinds of reader get the most out of a catalogue like this. The first arrives with a name and needs the current address before doing anything else, so the record puts that address at the top and dates it. The second arrives unsure whether a name is even real any more, and for them the seized branch answers the question in one line. Neither reader needs a sales pitch. They need a fact, quickly, that has not been tampered with.

If you want reviews, uptime graphs or step-by-step guides, those belong on other sites built for exactly that job. Keeping each of those out of here is deliberate. A directory that also sells opinions ends up bending its facts to match them, and once that starts the whole thing is worthless.

Records go stale, seizure dates get revised, and a project sometimes retires an address. When we learn a record is wrong we change it and move the date, rather than quietly editing history. A warrant canary and a signed feed are on the roadmap so that readers can confirm the site itself has not been quietly altered. Until those land, the safest habit is the same one we ask of everyone: check any address against a second source you already trust before you act on it.

Known addresses: where they come from

Nothing enters torindex pre-trusted. An address arrives from a submission, a forum mention, or an operator's own announcement, and it sits as unconfirmed until it clears the checks below — regardless of how well-known the project behind it already is.

How verification actually runs

The same sequence applies to every torindex entry, marketplace or otherwise: confirm the onion resolves over Tor and serves the expected project rather than a parking page or an unrelated site, then diff the full address character by character against any previously confirmed copy. Only after both checks pass does an entry earn the "on file" mark shown across this index.

Why status history matters as much as the current record

A torindex record is a snapshot with a date attached, never a live feed. That is why every entry carries a "first recorded" and a "last confirmed" field rather than a single unqualified status word — a reader deciding how much to trust an address should be able to see exactly when torindex last actually checked it, not just what the current label says.

torindex is one small, narrow piece of a larger onion market ecosystem, and being clear about that boundary is part of how torindex stays useful. torindex does not run a marketplace, does not process payments, and has no stake in whether any given onion market succeeds or fails. torindex's only job is the record: is this address the one the project actually publishes, checked on this date. Everything else about an onion market — vendor quality, dispute handling, order outcomes — sits outside what torindex was built to answer.

Why torindex does not review onion market vendors

A vendor review or a marketplace star rating requires exactly the kind of subjective judgment torindex's independence policy exists to avoid. torindex could, in principle, collect and publish vendor ratings the way a review site does, but doing so would blur the one distinction torindex is built around: a record of what was checked, not an opinion about what is good. Readers who need a vendor review for a specific onion market should look to a site built for that job; torindex stays narrow on purpose.

How torindex relates to a project's own channels

torindex is never the primary source for an onion market's own address — the project's own signed channel is. torindex's role is to independently confirm that a claimed address actually resolves and matches what the project publishes elsewhere, then record that confirmation with a date attached. When torindex and a project's own channel ever disagree about an address, that disagreement itself is useful information, and torindex documents rather than silently resolves it in its own favor.

Where torindex sends readers instead of guessing

torindex would rather point a reader toward a better source than pretend to have an answer it does not. If a question falls outside a directory's honest scope — Tor Browser configuration, bridge access in censored regions, how to handle a payment safely — torindex links to the methodology page for what torindex itself does, and to the independence-focused sources named earlier for everything else. A directory that tries to answer every question a visitor might have about an onion market ends up answering most of them badly; torindex would rather answer one question well.