Research Disclaimer

Research purpose

NexusWatch is maintained as an independent verification project. The records we publish are research artefacts: cryptographic attestations, signed canary references, observational logs, and lifecycle archives, compiled across multiple verification cycles and timestamped per cycle. The site exists so that researchers, journalists, and Tor users who need to authenticate an address against an outside source have a place to do that, and so that historical records of address rotations remain available after the addresses themselves have been retired.

Non-endorsement

We do not endorse, promote, broker, or facilitate any activity conducted through addresses documented in our registry. The act of documenting an address is not the act of recommending what is reachable through it. References to Nexus Market or to any other Tor-network entity in our archive are made for identification, attribution, and verification, never for promotion. We have no commercial relationship with the Nexus marketplace operator and no agency authority to act on the operator's behalf.

User responsibility

You are solely responsible for the legal compliance of whatever you do with information you find on this site. Local, national, and international laws about Tor traffic, marketplace activity, and adjacent topics differ across jurisdictions, and they change. Nothing on NexusWatch constitutes legal advice. If a specific use case has legal exposure attached to it, the question goes to a lawyer in your jurisdiction, not to a registry.

You are also responsible for your own operational security. Independent cryptographic verification of any onion address you act on, using a PGP keyring you have personally assembled and a Tor session you have personally established, is strongly recommended. Our records are evidence. They are not a substitute for the verification you do yourself.

Limits of our verification

Our monitoring infrastructure performs PGP signature validation, hidden service descriptor inspection, response signature recording, and lifecycle tracking. It does not, and cannot, guarantee that an address will behave correctly during a connection performed at a moment we did not observe. Tor hidden services can fail, can be reconfigured, and can be operated through periods of degraded availability without any of those events showing up in our cycle logs. A recent verification date reflects what was true at the timestamp shown. No more, no less.

If the evidence behind a record changes, the record changes. If the evidence is silent, the record is frozen. If you find yourself relying on a NexusWatch entry past the date in its "Last Verified" column, re-check the page before acting on it.

Address authenticity

Lookalike onion addresses are not theoretical. Operators rotate addresses, and during rotation windows similar-looking addresses are sometimes registered by parties who are not the operator. We document the addresses we can attest to. We cannot prevent unattested copies from appearing elsewhere on the network or in third-party listings. The defence against an unattested copy is the same defence that applies to every cryptographic record: verify the signature with a key you trust against text you have not modified, and treat any address that fails that check as a record that should not be acted on.

Corrections and updates

Corrections to entries in our archive are reviewed against the evidence standard described in the verification methodology documented on the About page. If a record is wrong, we want to know, and we want the evidence that demonstrates it. If a record needs updating because the operator has rotated the address, the update goes through the same validation cycle as the original entry. There are no exceptions to that cycle for any party, including the operator. The verification registry and the privacy policy carry the narrower operational and data-handling framing that complements this disclaimer.