Forget big donors Tor Project proved a crowd of small givers can bankroll internet freedom and raise over $200K

Date:
Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:32:05 +0000

Description:
The Tor Project's first participatory funding campaign raised over $200,000 for internet freedom tools, using quadratic funding to let community support, not wallet size, decide where the money went.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The Tor Project's debut participatory funding raised more than $200,000 A "quadratic funding" model meant the number of backers mattered more than the size of any single
donation The experiment was a response to a 2025 collapse in traditional funding Back in May, we covered the launch of an unusual fundraising experiment from the nonprofit behind the Tor Browser . The results are now
in, and they give the team reason to be cautiously optimistic.

More than $200,000 was raised in total, with $174,536 distributed to participating grantee projects. The campaign officially closed on June 19th, and the Tor Project has spent the weeks since reconciling a tangle of multi-currency, privacy-preserving donations before sharing the final
numbers. While most people rely on one of the best VPN services to keep their everyday browsing private, activists, whistleblowers, and journalists in heavily censored regions lean on a more specialized set of open-source tools. Those tools are exactly what this campaign set out to sustain. (Image credit: Future) NEW : Leave No Trace A weekly newsletter on digital privacy and online surveillance.

Leave No Trace investigates the companies and governments putting our digital freedom at risk and the people fighting back. You may like Meet Snowflake Volunteer: Tor's Android app that lets you help people bypass censorship 'A critical tool for fighting against an Orwellian future' Why users of this encrypted messaging app are helping keep the project alive 'Its time to punch more holes in the closed Internet' This free VPN now promises to be even better at evading censorship

Subscribe now to get every edition delivered to your inbox every Friday, launching this September. Small donations, big impact The headline figure hides a more interesting story: 580 unique donors made 662 contributions,
with an average donation size of just $41.

Direct community donations came to roughly $27,000, which was then added to
an existing matching pool with funds provided by the following organizations: Cake Wallet, the Ethereum Foundation, Logos, Octant, Xeovo, and Zcash Community Grants.

The campaign used quadratic funding , a model that rewards the breadth of support rather than the depth of any single wallet. While the organizations donated the biggest portion of the cash, it was the community donations that decided where that cash went. The results are in: Our first crowdfunding
round in partnership with @FundingCommons has raised more than $200k for projects working across privacy, censorship circumvention, secure communications, and public-interest digital infrastructure. https://t.co/Cy113fJHUy @web3privacy August 17, 2026 The timing was not accidental. US funding for global internet freedom was "effectively gutted"
in 2025, with many programs cut permanently and the main granting office issuing no money that year. What to read next Russia's censors want to block 92% of VPN apps by 2030 NymVPN just had its biggest two-month update yet, and a fresh redesign is already on the way 10 million downloads but no website? New TechRadar data reveals how Android VPNs are gaming the system to avoid supporting users effectively

Even the Open Technology Fund, a long-standing backer of tools like Tor and Signal, had its congressionally authorized grant terminated and went to court to try to save it.

The Tor Project frames this as a structural problem, not a one-off. When public-interest infrastructure leans too heavily on a single funder, one decision can put essential work at risk.

That fragility is sharpened by a worsening censorship climate: 2025 was the worst year on record for internet shutdowns , with censors also shifting toward more targeted blocks on apps and platforms. Where the money went Ten projects shared the pot, spanning censorship circumvention, secure messaging, and secure journalism.

Onion Browser , which brings Tor access to iOS, took the largest allocation at around $111,000, followed by Unredacted the non-profit behind the free, censorship-resistant FreeSocks VPN with roughly $41,000. Familiar names like SecureDrop , OnionShare , OONI , and Ricochet Refresh each received a guaranteed minimum.

The Tor Project is candid that the model is "promising, but operationally complex" (15% of the funds went to running the campaign), and that better-known projects had an advantage. Even so, smaller grantees reported a valuable side effect: new visibility, followers, and first-time discovery.

The round has now closed, but the team says it is already exploring what future matching pools could look like. Today's best VPN deals NordVPN 2 Year 2.59 /mth View +3 months free Surfshark 24 Months 1.79 /mth View Proton VPN
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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/forget-big-donors-tor-proje ct-proved-a-crowd-of-small-givers-can-bankroll-internet-freedom-and-raise-over -usd200k


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