Payments & Currencies — questions & answers
Payment topic hub. Which marketplaces accept which cryptocurrencies, why each is offered, when to use what.
Crypto payments on Tor markets have basically settled on two coins: Bitcoin and Monero. Every market we cover takes both. That's not a coincidence — it's the bar for being on this site at all. Bitcoin's the universal legacy option, mostly there because some vendors haven't moved on yet. Monero is the modern default and is what most operators expect you'll use if you don't have a specific reason to pick something else. Most payment questions come down to picking between those two.
Monero (XMR) is what to default to if privacy is why you're on Tor in the first place. The protocol hides amounts, sender, and receiver at the network layer. There's no public ledger to correlate against your exchange withdrawal. Trade-off is a smaller wallet ecosystem, slower confirmation (about twenty minutes at ten blocks), and XMR isn't on most centralized exchanges so funding it takes one extra step. Use the official Monero GUI/CLI with Tor proxy, or Feather Wallet. Don't use exchange-custodial wallets for darknet deposits.
Bitcoin (BTC) is the legacy option. The ledger is public, and forensic services routinely tie exchange withdrawals to on-chain darknet activity. So privacy is meaningfully worse than paying in XMR. Bitcoin is fine when your vendor only takes BTC, when the order is small enough that fees don't dominate, and when you have a fresh address that hasn't touched a known wallet. Marketplace credits usually come after two confirmations. Fees swing with network conditions and spike during busy periods.
Ethereum and Litecoin both have specific niches. Ethereum is natively accepted by Anubis only — most markets that look like they take ETH are actually using a third-party bridge to swap to BTC or XMR. Native acceptance is meaningfully different on both privacy and reliability. Litecoin is natively accepted by Nexus, Anubis, and Mars. It's the practical option for low-value deposits where BTC fees would dominate. LTC fees are pennies and confirmation is fast. Privacy properties are similar to BTC — public ledger, traceable.