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Method
How we score a market, and how it can lose the score
Every review here rests on the same seven dimensions, each marked from zero to five, with a written reason for the mark. The average becomes the headline number, and the number maps to a plain verdict. What follows is the full rubric, so you can argue with a grade instead of taking it on faith.
The seven dimensions
From number to verdict
Each dimension, explained in depth
Uptime
Uptime is read from a dedicated status board that probes each address on a short, fixed interval — Onionland Review does not run its own probe infrastructure and does not eyeball a single successful load and call it confirmed. A market with frequent, unexplained downtime scores lower here even if every other dimension is strong, because reachability is the precondition for everything else a review covers. For how onion-service reachability actually works underneath a status board's probe, the Tor Project's onion services documentation is the primary source.
PGP / Security
This dimension asks whether encryption is required or merely optional, how the market handles key management for buyers and vendors, and — critically — whether the defaults protect someone who does not go out of their way to configure anything. A market that makes strong security opt-in rather than default scores lower than one that makes the safe path the easy path. Readers new to PGP verification itself are better served by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's public-key encryption explainer than by a market-review page re-teaching the mechanism from scratch.
Escrow / Multisig
How funds are held between order and delivery, whether multisig is offered and set as default, and how aggressively the market's own interface pushes buyers toward finalizing early — a pattern that strips away the dispute protection escrow exists to provide. A market that quietly discourages its own safety mechanism scores worse here than one that leaves it untouched. Where a market's escrow settles in Monero specifically, the Monero project's user guides cover wallet and transaction mechanics this rubric does not restate.
Vendor base
Breadth and depth of the catalogue matter less than how much of it looks genuinely vetted rather than padded with low-effort or duplicate listings. A large but thin vendor base scores lower than a smaller one with visible, consistent quality control.
UX
Specifically whether the interface remains usable at Tor Browser's Safest security setting, with JavaScript off — not whether it looks polished with scripting enabled. A market that effectively requires a lowered security setting to function scores down on this dimension regardless of how modern its design looks.
Support
Ticket response time and, more importantly, consistency of dispute outcomes. This is the dimension buyers report feeling most directly, and it is scored from documented dispute patterns rather than a handful of anecdotal reports.
Longevity
How long the market has operated and, specifically, what kind of pressure it has visibly survived — a DDoS campaign, a law-enforcement scare, a mirror-address crisis — rather than raw calendar age alone. A market that has weathered a real stress event scores higher than one of equal age that has simply not yet been tested.
Conflicts and corrections
Because we take no ads and no affiliate money, there is no commercial reason to favour one market over another. When we get something wrong, we fix it in place, mark the date, and say what changed. A review is a dated snapshot, not a permanent verdict, and the markets it covers change under it constantly.
Methodology questions
Each dimension, in more depth
Uptime
Uptime asks how consistently a market's onion address actually answers over Tor, tracked from the dedicated status board rather than a single manual check. A market that goes dark for extended stretches, even if it always eventually returns, scores lower here than one with a steady, boring track record — reachability is the precondition for everything else on the rubric, and a market you cannot reliably reach cannot earn a high overall score no matter how it performs on the other six dimensions.
PGP / Security
This dimension weighs whether the market publishes a signed address of record at all, whether that signature has ever failed to match a legitimate rotation, and whether the market's own operational-security guidance to users is complete and current. A market with no signed canon, or with a documented history of publishing addresses that later turned out to be wrong, scores poorly here regardless of how polished its interface looks.
Escrow / Multisig
Escrow and multisig scoring looks at whether funds are actually held by the market rather than the vendor during a transaction, whether a dispute process exists and has a track record of resolving in both directions rather than reflexively favoring the market, and whether multisig is available as an option for buyers who want funds under joint control rather than sole market custody.
Vendor base
Vendor base scoring is not simply a raw vendor count — a large vendor base padded with low-activity or duplicate accounts scores lower than a smaller base with active, established vendors across a reasonable spread of categories. Depth and verification matter more here than headline numbers.
UX
UX covers whether the interface is usable without excessive friction: search that actually finds things, category navigation that makes sense, and a checkout flow that does not require guesswork. This dimension carries less weight than security-adjacent ones by design, since a beautiful interface on an insecure market is a worse outcome than a plain interface on a secure one.
Support
Support scoring tracks actual response times on real tickets, particularly during disputes, rather than a market's own stated SLA. A market that answers routine questions quickly but goes silent during disputes scores lower here than the response-time average alone would suggest, since dispute-window responsiveness is what actually matters to a buyer or vendor in trouble.
Longevity
Longevity weighs how long a market has operated without a major unresolved incident — an exit scam, a prolonged unexplained outage, or a documented mass-compromise. A newer market is not automatically penalized, since every market was new once, but a longer clean track record is weighted as meaningful evidence rather than treated as irrelevant history.
Every one of these seven dimensions gets scored the same way on every market Onionland Review covers, on the same zero-to-five scale, using the same evidence standard — this is what keeps an Onionland Review verdict comparable across markets rather than a collection of one-off impressions. Where the evidence for a given dimension is genuinely insufficient, Onionland Review marks that dimension rather than guessing at a number, which is the direct source of an overall Unrated verdict when it happens.