About
What torhaven is, and what it is not: an independent Tor handbook (2026)
torhaven is a handbook for people who are new to Tor and want to understand it before they rely on it. It is a place to read, not a place to buy, and it is written to make you less dependent on it over time, not more.
On this page
On this page
Who this torhaven handbook is for
The reader torhaven writes for has heard the words but not the reasoning. They know PGP is important without knowing why, or they have a bookmark for a market and no way to tell if it still points where it should. Every torhaven guide is built to close one of those gaps in a single sitting, and to leave you able to do the thing yourself rather than having to come back and ask.
New to Tor entirely
If you have never opened Tor Browser, start with the torhaven fundamentals guide rather than this page. This about page explains torhaven's stance, not the mechanics of the network itself — that grounding lives in the guide library, and it is worth reading first so the rest of this page has something concrete to attach to.
Already using Tor, still guessing at safety
A larger share of readers already browse over Tor but have never formalized a verification habit — no PGP key imported, no routine for checking an onion address before trusting it. torhaven exists specifically to close that gap without assuming you are starting from zero.
Coming back to verify one specific thing
Not every visit here is a first visit. A returning reader is often here to re-check one narrow thing — whether a specific onion address matches the signed record, or whether a piece of advice they half-remember is still current — rather than to read a guide start to finish again. The torhaven guide library is indexed for exactly that kind of visit; use the search-your-browser shortcut against a guide's own page rather than skimming from the top.
How torhaven stays independent
Independence is not a slogan at torhaven, it is the business model. There are no adverts on these pages, no affiliate links, and no arrangement where a market pays to be described more kindly. That matters because the moment a guide has a financial reason to steer you somewhere, it stops being a guide and starts being a sales pitch wearing one. torhaven would rather tell you plainly that we cannot vouch for a market than earn a commission implying that we can.
What "no affiliate revenue" actually rules out
Concretely: no tracked referral links, no revenue-share arrangement with any market or exchange, and no sponsored placement disguised as an ordinary guide. If a link on torhaven points somewhere, it points there because we verified it, not because a click is worth anything to us.
Why this matters more on Tor specifically
On the clearnet, a reader who suspects a review is paid for has other signals to fall back on: brand reputation, a company's public track record, regulatory disclosure requirements. None of that scaffolding exists the same way for a Tor darknet market, which makes an independent guide's honesty about its own incentives one of the few checks a reader actually has. That is a large part of why torhaven treats "no affiliate revenue" as a structural commitment rather than a footnote.
Our standing pledge
- No advertising, anywhere on the site.
- No affiliate revenue and no paid placement, ever.
- We show onion addresses as plain text and point you to a signed source, rather than asking you to trust our link.
- We publish dates you can read, and we move a date only when the page actually changed.
- We say when we do not know something, instead of filling the gap with confidence.
How torhaven fits with the rest of the network
torhaven teaches, but torhaven does not try to be everything. When you need the canonical list of addresses, we send you to the signed directory at torindex. When you need to check a signature or an address, we send you to torverify. Splitting those jobs keeps each one honest, and it means a guide never has to pretend to be a live status board or a verification tool it is not.
Why the split matters
A single site trying to teach, list, and verify at once ends up doing all three worse, and it makes each function harder to check independently — you cannot audit a directory's accuracy separately from the prose praising it if they live on the same page with the same incentive. Keeping torhaven, torindex, and torverify as separate torhaven-network properties with separate, narrow jobs is a deliberate structural choice, not an accident of how the network grew.
Where torhaven sends you for deeper technical detail
torhaven teaches the habits, but it does not try to out-document the projects that build the tools those habits depend on. Where a reader needs the authoritative word on how a piece of software actually works, we point outward rather than paraphrase secondhand:
- For the network itself, the Tor Project publishes the software, the download, and the technical specification torhaven's own guides summarize in plain language.
- For broader digital-safety practice beyond Tor specifically, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense guide and the independently maintained Privacy Guides project cover ground torhaven deliberately does not duplicate.
- For the amnesic operating systems mentioned in our "coming next" guides, Tails and Whonix are the primary sources, not torhaven's eventual comparison of them.
- For PGP itself, the OpenPGP standard and the GnuPG implementation are what our PGP guide is drafted against, not the other way around.
- For password and key storage, KeePassXC is the kind of maintained, audited tool our verification routines assume a careful reader already has.
- For sending a verified file directly rather than through a market's own upload form, OnionShare is built by the same community norms torhaven tries to model.
- For the two currencies our market-safety guides discuss, Monero's own documentation and Bitcoin.org explain the mechanics better than a summary page ever could.
None of this is an endorsement deal or a partnership — torhaven has no relationship, financial or otherwise, with any project on that list. It is simply where we would send a friend who wanted the primary source instead of our summary of it.
How a torhaven guide gets written
Every torhaven guide follows the same process before it publishes, regardless of topic. That consistency is deliberate: a reader should be able to trust the newest guide as much as the oldest one, because both went through the same checks rather than one being a rushed afterthought.
Drafted against a primary source, not a summary of one
Where a claim can be checked against the Tor Project's own documentation, a project's published PGP key, or comparable primary material, that is what a torhaven guide is drafted against — not a summary of a summary that has drifted from the original over several retellings. Where no primary source exists, or where the honest answer is "this varies" or "we do not know," the guide says so directly instead of inventing false precision.
Reviewed for what it implies, not only what it states
A technically accurate sentence can still leave a false impression by omission — describing a market's escrow system without noting who actually controls the release, for instance. Review here checks for that kind of implied overstatement specifically, since it is the failure mode a purely fact-by-fact check tends to miss.
Dated, and re-dated only when it changes
A torhaven guide's published date reflects when it was last materially edited, not when someone last glanced at it. If a guide's date has not moved in a long time, that means nothing about it needed correcting, not that it was forgotten.
What torhaven does not do
Scope discipline is as much a part of torhaven's editorial stance as accuracy is. A torhaven handbook that tries to do everything ends up doing the core job worse, so the following are deliberately out of scope rather than gaps we intend to fill later.
- No live status monitoring. This handbook does not run uptime checks against onion addresses in real time; that job belongs to torindex, built specifically for it.
- No market recommendations. Nothing here tells you which market to use. Guides explain how to evaluate one yourself, which is a different thing entirely.
- No vendor or seller vetting. We have no visibility into any market's internal vendor history, and does not claim otherwise.
- No custody of funds, keys, or credentials. Nothing here ever asks you to send money, paste a private key, or hand over a password.
How to read this torhaven page skeptically, the way we would want you to
A torhaven page that claims independence is, by definition, asking to be taken at its word for at least one thing: that the claim itself is true. Rather than ask for that trust blindly, here is what actually backs it up, and what a skeptical reader can check without relying on anything written on this page.
What you can verify without trusting us at all
Every onion address on torhaven is shown as plain text specifically so it can be checked against a signed source you control, not against our say-so. The dates on every guide are visible and move only when content changes, so a stale claim is easy to spot by comparison rather than by taking our word that nothing needed fixing. None of that requires believing anything we say about our own motives.
What you cannot verify, and why we say so anyway
Whether the person writing a given page genuinely has no financial stake in any market is not something a reader can audit from outside — there is no public ledger of who runs a handbook like torhaven. What we can offer instead is a structural argument: no payment processor is wired into torhaven, no affiliate code sits in any link, and no sponsored placement exists to disguise. A reader can decide for themselves how much that structural absence is worth, and treat every specific claim on the surrounding pages on its own evidentiary merits rather than on a blanket assumption of trust.
Why this matters more than a mission statement would
A mission statement is free to write and costs nothing to break. What makes a claim of independence worth more than that is whether the incentives actually line up with it in a way a reader could, in principle, check for themselves — and that is the standard the rest of this page has tried to meet rather than merely assert.
Corrections and contact
If something on torhaven is wrong, we want it fixed, and a correction is not an embarrassment but the point of publishing dates in the first place. Our approach to errors, sources and updates is set out in full in the editorial policy. That page is the one to read if you want to understand not just what we claim but how we hold ourselves to it.
Common questions
Is torhaven affiliated with any darknet market?
No. We have no ownership stake, revenue arrangement, or editorial relationship with any market it writes about, including Torzon. That independence is the entire premise of the site.
Who actually writes these guides?
The editorial policy covers this in more detail, but in short: guides are written and reviewed against primary sources before publishing, with no single guide published without that check.
Does this site ever get anything wrong?
Yes, and when it does, the fix is a dated correction rather than a quiet edit. See the editorial policy for exactly how corrections are handled.
Why does torhaven send readers to other sites like torindex and torverify?
Because those sites do one job each and do it well — a live directory and a signature checker — and this site would do both worse if it tried to absorb them into a teaching-focused handbook.
Does torhaven link to outside projects like the Tor Project or GnuPG?
Yes, where a reader is better served by the primary source than by torhaven's summary of it — the Tor Project's own documentation, GnuPG, Tails and a small list of similarly maintained projects. See the "Where torhaven sends you for deeper technical detail" section above for the full list and why each one is there.
Is torhaven paid or partnered with any of the tools it mentions, like Tails or KeePassXC?
No. Mentioning a maintained, widely audited tool by name is not a partnership, and none of the projects torhaven links to know or care that this page exists. The same no-affiliate-revenue rule that applies to markets applies to every outbound link on the site.