The interstitial, explained
The screen everyone waits through, what it is doing, and the one situation where it should worry you.
Most users treat the checking screen as a loading delay. It is doing real work, and the work is unusual enough that explaining it clears up several recurring questions at once.
Why it exists at all
A hidden service cannot see who is connecting. No source address, no geography, no reputation, no history. Every connection arrives through a rendezvous point looking exactly like every other connection. The entire toolkit clearnet services use to separate people from scripts is unavailable.
What remains is asking the connecting client to do something that costs a little and proving it did. For one person opening a page the cost is invisible. For someone opening a hundred thousand connections it is the difference between cheap and not worth doing. That asymmetry is the whole mechanism, and it is close to the only defence available at this layer.
Why not a captcha
Captchas assume you can tell repeat visitors apart, which requires exactly the identity signal that does not exist here. They also degrade badly at the Safest security level, since the scripting they depend on is switched off, and telling users to lower their security settings to get through a security check is an obviously bad trade.
Third party captcha services are worse still, because they involve routing a request to an outside party who then learns something about the connection. On this beat that is not a small compromise, it is the thing the whole architecture exists to prevent.
How long it should take
| A few seconds | Normal. The work is small and most of what you are waiting on is circuit latency rather than computation. |
|---|---|
| Twenty or thirty seconds | Congestion, or a slow circuit. Annoying, not meaningful. Building a new circuit usually helps more than waiting. |
| Stuck indefinitely | Usually a dead circuit rather than a stuck check. Get a new circuit or try another address rather than continuing to wait. |
| Loops back repeatedly | Sometimes a client side issue with scripting settings, sometimes heavy filtering during a flood. If it persists across addresses, wait it out. |
The one version worth worrying about
An interstitial that asks for something. The genuine screen asks for nothing. It does not want credentials, does not ask you to confirm your account, does not request a wallet address, and does not tell you to lower your browser security to proceed.
A checking screen is an excellent disguise for a credential prompt precisely because people have been trained to wait passively through it and click whatever appears next. If a screen presented as a check asks for input, that is the moment to stop and verify where you are, not the moment to comply because the page looks like something you have seen before.
What it does not do
It does not identify you, does not track you between visits, and does not tell the platform anything about your machine that persists. It also provides no protection to you. It protects the service from automated load, and it is not a security feature from the user side. The thing protecting you is the signature check on the login screen after it.
Verified working Nexus Market mirrors
Three v3 onion addresses currently serving the production market, signed under PGP fingerprint 0x7F2A0A9D. Use the Copy buttons.