From nothing to the storefront in four steps.
Reaching Nexus takes four steps, and doing them in order closes most of the ways a first visit goes wrong.
Download Tor Browser only from the official Tor Project site, verify the signature on the first install, and set the security level to Safest. A normal browser cannot open an onion address, and Safest closes the biggest hole by turning scripting off. Nexus works fine at Safest.
Copy an address from the verified list on this page, never type a fifty-six character string by hand. Open it in Tor Browser. When the login loads, hold the address in your bar against the one the captcha prints. Match means genuine, mismatch means close the tab. Then register with a fresh username and a unique password.
It is not a privacy skin over an ordinary browser. It routes every request through three relays, none of which sees both who you are and what you asked for, and it ships with a configuration deliberately identical for everybody so users do not stand out from each other. That second part is why adding extensions is a mistake: each one makes your browser more distinguishable, which is the opposite of what the bundle is for.
Downloading from the right place protects you from a modified copy only if the download arrived unmodified. The project publishes a small signature file next to each release, and checking it proves the bytes on your disk are the bytes they published. It takes ten minutes once. A message saying the key is not certified with a trusted signature is normal and is not a failure, the line that matters is the one confirming the signature is good.
Safest turns scripting off everywhere, which removes the surface nearly every serious browser attack of the last decade arrived through. Some pages look plainer and a few controls stop responding. That is the setting working. The habit to avoid is lowering it to fix a page, because people rarely put it back afterwards.
A cold connection crosses about six relays with no caching anywhere in the chain. Eight to forty five seconds before anything appears is normal, and up to a minute is fine when the market is busy. Every page after the first reuses the connection and arrives in seconds, which is why one long session gets far more done than four short visits.
Open any other onion service you know. If that also fails, the problem is on your side and a full restart of Tor Browser clears most of it. If other onions work and this one does not, work down the address list rather than reloading the same one. The troubleshooting guide covers each failure shape in detail.
Nexus Market