Appendix B. Brief history

A timeline of the storefront

A short editorial timeline of the TorZon Market storefront. Not comprehensive, but enough context for a reader who wants to know why the current architecture looks the way it does.

Launch, 2023

TorZon Market opened in the autumn of 2023 with two onion mirrors and a bond-based vendor system. From the first announcement, deposits ran on 2 of 3 multisig by default. The operator PGP key that signed the launch announcement has not changed since.

Anti-DDoS queue introduced, 2024

Late 2024 saw the introduction of a wait page in front of the login. Before that, login was direct against captcha. The queue was a response to a coordinated credential-stuffing pattern that hit multiple Tor storefronts in the same window.

Captcha with baked address, 2025

Mid-2025 the captcha image started carrying the current onion address in the small print. This is a cheap, hard-to-clone phishing check. Every serious Tor storefront picked it up over the following year.

Mirror count grows, 2025 to 2026

The set grew from two mirrors at launch to the current six. Each rotation adds the new address to the published set before removing the retired one, so the count during a transition briefly shows seven.

Present, 2026

Six mirrors, same operator signing key, 2 of 3 multisig on every order. Roughly one primary rotation every eight to ten months, mirror rotations every six weeks on average.