Crown Market: onion address and mirrors

Opening Crown Market

Start in Tor Browser, the build from torproject.org/download, security level at Standard. A .onion host does not resolve in Chrome or Firefox, and a clearnet gateway that translates it reads everything that passes through, so the direct browser is the only view that reaches the market unfiltered.

Look at the panel above. Three strings sit there, and beside each one is a small copy button. Click the button next to the string you want and let it fill the clipboard. Do not retype: a hand entry into 56 characters drops one, and the result is a different site. Paste into the address bar, press enter.

Now watch the screen. For the first ten to sixty seconds it stays blank, or a spinner turns in the center, and that blank is the circuit being built, not a failure. On a slow line it can stretch toward a couple of minutes. If the words connection reset appear while the address is still resolving, that is normal for a v3 service. Wait, then reload once. When the storefront fills the page, with the header and the search field where you expect them, you are on Crown.

What to check when you arrive

Scan the page top to bottom before you type a password. Each check has a place on the screen.

• The address bar, top of the window. Read the string back as it sits there. Before the .onion it is exactly 56 characters, letters a to z and digits 2 to 7, no zero and no one anywhere. A short or long string, or a 0 or a 1 in it, is not Crown.
• The header. The logo and the market name live here, above the search field and the category row. A typosquat copies this row and shifts one thing, a letter in the name, a color off, a mark where none belongs. The typosquat block above lists the single-character variants. If the name you see matches a variant, you are looking at the copy.
• The footer. The PGP fingerprint is posted there, or in the about section. Read it and set it against the one in the panel above, block by block. A match means the key on the page is the one Crown signs its releases with. A mismatch means a different key wearing a similar shape.
• The announcements area. When Crown rotates, the new address lands in a PGP-signed release, not in a comment. The release checks out against the fingerprint, so the string and the key confirm each other. If the address you opened came from anywhere but a signed release, treat it as a claim until the check says otherwise.

Logging in

The email is the one made for the market, not the one on your name, your work, or your bank. The password is the one that has never appeared anywhere else. If it leaks later, the leak ends at this account.

On the screen, the login sits in one place: the market's own page, after the storefront has loaded. The sequence is store first, form second. A password field that shows up before you have seen the store is not this market. Close the tab and come back from the board.

An interface you can read

Crown's interface is not decorated to impress. It is built so that the state of your money is visible while you are looking at it. Search and the vendor and category filters put a listing in front of you quickly, but the part that saves people is the order view. Open an open order and the escrow state is written down in it: how much is held, whether the vendor has released it, and what the release timer is doing. You do not have to ask the market where your coins are. You can read it.

That is why a clean interface is not marketing on a market. It is fewer mistakes. When you can see where the coins went, how much sits in escrow, and when a release happens, there is less room for a number to be wrong and for you to be the last one to notice. The purchase history works the same way: it shows what you bought, what you paid, and what state each order ended in, so a past order is not a memory you have to trust.

Your own balances sit in the account area, and the pending funds are shown separately from the spendable amount. The pending number is coins the market has not finished processing yet, usually a deposit still confirming. Watch that number when you fund the account. It should move from pending into the balance. If a deposit confirms on the chain and the pending amount does not clear, that is the moment to open a ticket, not the moment after you have spent the money.

If the address does not open

Give the circuit the full minute, then one reload. Still blank, take the next string from the board. All three open the same market, so the next one is the same destination by a different route. All three fail and the network is the cause: some providers throttle Tor, and bridge mode under the Tor Browser settings works around it. The ordered version is in the access guide.

Three equal strings, one fingerprint, and an order page that shows the escrow state while it happens. The checks run before the first password, and everything after that is on the market's page.