The first-time approach when a friend sent me a note

A friend had scribbled the phrase on the back of a receipt. I had never opened Tor in my life. This is what the first time looked like from the note in my pocket to the nexus market address in front of me.

The note itself and what was on it

The note said nexus market in blue biro, then find the .onion, then use Tor Browser, not Chrome. Three lines, and the last one was underlined twice. That was the entire thing my friend gave me. There was no address on the note.

I put the note next to the laptop and read it a couple more times. First-time approaches to any market start the same way, in my experience: with a small amount of information, and a strong wish to just click through to something. I made myself sit and look at the three lines instead of typing anything.

The word that mattered most was find. My friend had not given me the nexus market address. They had given me the phrase. The phrase is safe to type; the address is what you copy carefully.

The browser question, before anything else

Tor Browser is a version of Firefox with a routing layer bolted underneath. It goes to onion addresses. A regular browser cannot. The nexus market address is an onion address, so a first-time approach without Tor Browser is not really an approach at all; it is a search that will end in a wrong page.

I did the sensible boring thing and installed Tor Browser from its own site. I did not use a mirror somebody had linked in a comment. I did not use a bundled version off a forum. The point was to have the browser be exactly what the browser is meant to be, and nothing else. If you are approaching nexus market for the first time and you are already tempted to skip this paragraph, that is the paragraph to reread.

I did not turn off any of the browser's default settings. First time out, the defaults are more careful than any setting I could pick.

Where I actually looked for the address

This is the awkward part of any first-time approach. I did not know the nexus market onion by heart, and I did not want to trust the first thing a search engine handed me. Search results near a market's name are the messiest neighbourhood on the whole internet. Half of them are advertising in disguise.

So I did two things. I read one long directory-style article on the phrase nexus market url from a source that looked patient rather than salesy, and I read a comment from my friend saying which of the three official addresses they had used most recently. That comment was in an ordinary chat app, not on any market forum, and I trust the chat because I know my friend, not because the app is any good at trust.

Where the two sources overlapped, I took the address seriously. Where they diverged, I set them both aside. This is the whole first-time approach in one sentence, and I would tell any friend to do the same thing.

The three onion addresses at the top of this article

The three nexus market addresses sit at the top of this article, in the addresses block. They are the same three the market publishes and they are given here in no particular order. I chose one, copied it whole, and pasted it into Tor Browser. I did not type it by hand. Onion addresses are long strings that end in .onion, and one wrong character opens the wrong page.

The copy button next to each address is there for exactly this. It puts the whole string on the clipboard in one action, which removes the small chance of missing the first or last character.

This site does not check whether any of the three is up right now. If the first one you try does not load in Tor Browser, the second one is what you try next.

The first page and how to read it

When the onion loads, the front page shows the market's own wordmark and a captcha, and after that a login box. Nothing on this site knows what your login is; that is a matter for you and the market. What I did on the first-time approach was to not log in. I looked at the page, read the small print at the bottom, and closed the tab.

The reason for closing without logging in was that I wanted my first look to be a look. I did not want to combine the first visit with the first account and the first choice about how to fund it. That is three things at once, and any one of them is easier to think about on its own.

The second visit, an hour later, was the visit where I made an account. But that is a different article and a different approach.

Small things that are easy to get wrong on a first-time approach

• Copying only part of the address, because it wraps across two lines in a mail client. The copy button on this page is here for that.
• Typing the phrase nexus market into Tor Browser's address bar. That is a search, not an onion visit. The onion goes in the same address bar, but it starts with http:// and ends in .onion.
• Trusting a favicon. A favicon is a small square of pixels, and pixels are not proof of anything.
• Signing in on the very first visit. If you are new, look first, and come back to sign in.

What was different from what I expected

I expected a first-time approach to nexus market to feel like sneaking into somewhere. It did not. It felt more like the first time you use a bank's website that a friend has been using for years. There was a login form, a heading, and a footer. Almost every disorienting thing about the experience was the loading time, which is slower than a regular website, and that is Tor being Tor.

The other thing that surprised me was how small the first-time approach was in the end. Three lines on a note, one careful copy, one look. The nexus market address is not a place you have to fight to reach. It is a place you have to reach slowly.

What this article is not. This is not a security guide, and it is not a claim that any of the three addresses is up right now. It is one first-time route, in order.