A short wait page before the login that rate-limits bots so they cannot hammer the captcha.
Escrow
Holding a payment in a 2 of 3 multisig contract until buyer and vendor agree the order is done.
Finalise-early (FE)
Confirming receipt before a package arrives. It releases escrow to the vendor and removes the dispute path.
Litecoin (LTC)
A coin like Bitcoin that settles faster and cheaper, useful for small orders. Accepted on Nexus.
Mirror
A distinct onion address resolving to the same market. Nexus runs several for redundancy.
Monero (XMR)
A privacy coin that hides sender, receiver and amount. The default choice on Nexus.
Onion address
A fifty-six character v3 Tor address ending in .onion. Copy it, never type it, and verify against the captcha.
PGP signature
A cryptographic signature proving who published a message and that it is unchanged. Nexus signs its mirror list.
Recovery phrase
The words that restore an account if the password is lost. Store it on paper. No login ever asks for it.
Safest
The top Tor Browser security level, scripting off everywhere. The correct setting for Nexus.
Circuit
The path of relays your traffic takes. Onion connections join two of them in the middle, which is why they are slower than ordinary browsing.
Cold load
The first page of a session, which pays for the whole connection setup and takes tens of seconds. Later pages reuse it and arrive in a few.
Descriptor
A small signed record an onion service publishes saying which relays will accept an introduction for it. If your client cannot find it you get a not found error.
Guard
The first relay in your path. It stays the same for weeks on purpose, because rotating it constantly would give more chances to be observed rather than fewer.
Multisig
An address requiring more than one signature to move funds. Nexus uses two of three, held by buyer, vendor and market separately.
Origin
How a browser decides what belongs to what. Each onion address is its own origin, so a session on one mirror does not carry to another.
Rendezvous point
A relay you choose where both you and the service build circuits so the two halves can be joined. Neither side learns where the other is.
Security level
The shield setting in Tor Browser. Safest turns scripting off everywhere and is the right choice for anything that matters.
Signature verification
Checking a downloaded file or a published message against the publisher signature to prove it was not modified. Ten minutes once, and the only proof available.
Throughput
How much data a path can carry per second. Separate from latency, which is why text can be instant while images crawl.
Time to first byte
How long between pressing enter and the first data arriving. On an onion service this is mostly network setup rather than the site thinking.
Two factor
A second login step, which on these markets usually means decrypting a challenge with your PGP key rather than a code sent to a phone.
Nexus Market