Vendor reputation: how signed feedback survives a server seizure
On most darknet markets a server seizure ends a vendor career. On Nexus, signed feedback means a vendor can carry a reputation across an infrastructure event without re-earning trust from scratch.
The standard darknet-market reputation model breaks the moment the server goes down. A vendor's rating, feedback history, and dispute record live in the platform's database; if the database is seized, taken offline, or quietly tampered with, the vendor restarts somewhere else with zero history. The asymmetry that creates — long-term effort wiped out by a single law-enforcement action — is one of the most damaging structural weaknesses of post-Hydra markets.
Nexus Market's design begins from the assumption that the database is hostile. Buyer feedback is signed at write time with the buyer's PGP key, the vendor's PGP key, and a platform-side timestamping signature. The signed envelope is committed to a write-once vendor profile and replicated off-server to a content-addressed feedback registry that buyers and vendors can mirror locally.
What this buys
Three concrete things. First, ratings cannot be altered after the fact — not by a hostile platform, not by a compromised database, not by a moderator with grievances. Second, a vendor whose primary infrastructure is seized can re-establish identity on a new host by re-presenting the signed feedback envelopes; the new platform can verify them against the vendor's public key without trusting the previous platform. Third, buyers gain a portable trust score that survives platform churn — valuable because the median darknet platform lifetime sits well under three years.
“If you sign every feedback at write time, the database stops being load-bearing for trust. The platform becomes a coordinator, not the authority. That is the architectural shift.” — protocol designer, public talk, mid-2024
The catch
It works only as long as both sides keep their keys. A vendor who loses their PGP private key cannot prove the historical feedback is theirs — the chain of signatures still validates, but the question of whether the new vendor account is the same legal-fiction-on-Tor as the old one becomes unanswerable. Every serious vendor on Nexus operates with a hardware-backed offline copy of their PGP key and a documented mnemonic recovery flow. Buyers who care about cross-market reputation portability take the same precaution.
Working Nexus Market mirrors
Below are the three v3 onion addresses currently serving the production market, signed with the platform's PGP key (fingerprint 0x7F2A0A9D). Use the Copy button — never retype an onion by hand.