Rankings / How we rank
How we rank darknet markets
A ranking is only worth as much as its method. Here is exactly what moves a market up or down our board — and, just as important, what a high rank does not mean.
The four things we score
Track record. How long has the market operated, and is its history clean? Years online without an exit scam is the single strongest positive signal, which is why long-running markets cluster at the top.
Redundancy. How many working onion mirrors does it keep? A market with four addresses stays reachable when one node is reindexing; a single-address market goes fully dark when its one onion is quiet. Resilience is a buyer-facing feature, so we weight it.
Payment privacy. Monero-only settlement and a working escrow protect buyers in ways Bitcoin-only markets do not. Enforced privacy scores higher than optional privacy.
Security enforcement. A market that requires PGP at login is protecting its users from themselves. We score enforced security above security that is merely available.
What a high rank does not mean
- It is not a safety guarantee. No darknet market is risk-free, and the top pick can change overnight.
- It is not an endorsement. We measure buyer-checkable signals, not the legality or morality of anything.
- It is not static. Rankings reflect the last update date at the foot of every page; a market can rise or fall between them.
- It is not a substitute for your own caution. Read avoid scams — the habits there matter more than any rank.
Why addresses come from one source
Every onion we list is cross-checked against the market's own canonical source before it goes on a review page, and the "Open official link" buttons route through a verified hub rather than a hardcoded address. That is deliberate: markets rotate onions, and a ranking that points at a stale link is worse than no ranking at all.