Two markets. Live mirrors. A working atlas.

If you arrive on most darknet directories, you are met with fifty market cards, half pointing at dead onions, the other half at platforms that exit-scammed their balances some months ago. The phrase "darknet directory" has become synonymous with low-quality aggregation. We have read those directories. We do not do what they do.

OnionAtlas covers two markets. Anubis and Nexus. Both pass the bar that most directories do not enforce. Multisig escrow as the default contract, so the platform cannot run with the funds. Monero as the default currency, so your deposit is not in a public ledger waiting to be clustered. Three live mirrors with active rotation, so a flood on one address does not break your day. The smaller markets miss at least one of these. The bigger ones do not exist. Hence two.

Why this approach

Coverage is a tradeoff. A directory that lists fifty markets is selling reach. A directory that lists two is selling signal. Reach gets paid in directory placement deals; signal gets paid in repeat readers. The atlas has chosen the second. The two markets it covers are covered properly: deep profiles, working mirror tables, honest reviews, structural commentary. The ones it does not cover are not covered at all. There is no middle.

The two markets, briefly

Anubis Market is the newer entry. New buyer accounts default into Monero. New vendor accounts default into multisig. Three production mirrors run in parallel. Dispute panel staffed and the panel\'s rulings show up on the order page. Vendor onboarding is gated by a vetting step that screens out burner accounts. Read more in the Anubis long read.

Nexus Market is the heavyweight. Operational longer than Anubis, with a deeper vendor pool and a larger archive of buyer feedback entries. Defaults are the same as Anubis: Monero, multisig, three mirrors. Slightly more accumulated rules, slightly busier dispute filing form, materially more depth in the data. Read the Nexus long read.

Coverage is a tradeoff. A directory that lists fifty markets is selling reach. A directory that lists two is selling signal.

The argument for both

Both markets clear the bar. The structural protections (multisig, XMR, mirror discipline, dispute panel, vetted vendor onboarding) are the same. The buyer-facing experience differs in degree, not in kind. Anubis is cleaner; Nexus is deeper. Both are reasonable. The atlas has no preference and recommends staying on whichever platform you have history.

If you are new and forced to pick, the recommendation is Anubis for cleanliness, Nexus for depth. The structural argument is in the comparison page; the working buyer\'s reads are in Inside Anubis and Inside Nexus.

Profile · Anubis

Anubis Market

Monero by default, multisig built in, three live mirrors that the prober checks every ten minutes.

99.42%Uptime

1,860Vendors

$612K24h vol

Profile · Nexus

Nexus Market

A long-running marketplace with rotating mirrors, vendor reputation that actually means something, and a dispute panel that ships rulings on time.

99.81%Uptime

3,120Vendors

$1.4M24h vol

If you are new here

Read four pages, in this order: Onboarding, Tor walkthrough, Multisig versus single-sig, Common buyer mistakes. Forty minutes of reading, you are operational.