BASICS / PLAIN ENGLISH
What Is a Darknet Market?
Start here if the words are new. A darknet market is a commerce site that runs as a Tor onion service instead of on the open web. You reach it through Tor Browser, not Chrome. WeTheNorth is one such market, based in Canada. This page explains the parts so the rest of the site makes sense.
What are darknet markets, exactly?
A darknet marketplace is a website that lists vendors and products and handles payment, like any shop, with one difference. It does not live at a normal domain. It lives at an onion address inside the Tor network. That address is the whole identity of the market. There is no company name in a registrar database, no clearnet homepage. The onion string is the market. Think of it as a shop that chose to have no street address, no phone-book listing, and no storefront you could ever walk past, one that exists only as a cryptographic string you either have exactly right or do not have at all. No middle ground. Lose the exact string and you lose the market. The address is the whole risk surface. That is where phishing lives.
What is an onion link?
An onion link is an address that ends in .onion and resolves only through Tor. The current version, v3, is 56 characters of base32 before the suffix. Those characters are derived from the service public key, so the address verifies the server by itself. No certificate authority sits in the middle. The catch is human. The string is long and unreadable, so a fake that changes one character looks almost identical. That is why a market like WeTheNorth signs its address list with PGP. You compare. You do not trust.
What "WeTheNorth" means here
The phrase we the north has a loud sports meaning in Canada. On this site it means something else: a specific Canadian darknet market, sometimes written wethenorth or shortened to WTN. Toronto turns up in the market context too, alongside dispensary-style listings. When you read WeTheNorth on these pages, read the marketplace, never the slogan.
Honest limit: these definitions are general. Individual markets differ in rules, payment, and safety, and this page does not track any single vendor or listing.
Beginner questions
Can I open a darknet market in a normal browser?
No. Onion addresses resolve only inside Tor. Use Tor Browser or Tails.
Why is the address so long?
A v3 onion is 56 characters because it encodes the service public key. That length is what makes the address self-authenticating.
Where do I go once I understand this?
Read the WeTheNorth review, then the access guide.