Market · October 14, 2025
In mid-October 2025, TorZon Market announced and began rolling out a significantly enhanced vendor verification system. The changes introduced new badge tiers, increased bond requirements for certain categories, additional PGP verification steps, and a more sophisticated algorithmic trust score. This article examines each change and its implications for the buyer experience.
The original system offered a single verified vendor badge. The updated system introduces three tiers: Verified (under 100 transactions), Established (100-1000 transactions with 4.5+ rating), and Trusted (1000+ transactions, 4.7+ rating, 6+ months on platform). Each tier has distinct visual indicators in vendor profiles and search results, allowing buyers to immediately distinguish between recently onboarded vendors and those with long, proven track records.
The Trusted tier also displays an indicator showing whether the vendor's identity was verified against their presence on previous platforms — a significant trust signal that allows experienced buyers to cross-reference vendor reputations with the broader community.
The enhancement introduced higher vendor bonds for specific higher-risk categories. Vendors in these categories must maintain larger security deposits to be allowed to list. This increases the financial commitment required from vendors in areas where the consequences of scamming are most significant, aligning incentives more strongly toward honest behaviour.
A new algorithmic trust score replaced the simple star average in vendor profile prominence. The algorithm weights recent feedback more heavily than old feedback, penalises dispute losses more heavily than wins are rewarded, flags unusual review patterns, and tracks vendor response time and communication quality. This makes it significantly harder for vendors to coast on historical reputation while providing degraded service in the present.
For buyers, the practical implication is straightforward: sort by trust score rather than raw star rating when evaluating unfamiliar vendors. Visit our FAQ for more guidance on vendor selection.