Tor Project spearheads cryptocurrency crowdfunding initiative for digital freedom
According to Freedom House, worldwide internet freedom has experienced a continuous 15-year downward trend, as an increasing number of nations implement broader restrictions on internet accessibility.
The Tor Project has joined forces with a group of privacy advocates and internet freedom proponents to unveil a cryptocurrency-based fundraising initiative designed to bolster censorship-resistant digital infrastructure.
This groundbreaking Web3 crowdfunding effort for internet freedom technologies will provide backing to 10 nonprofit organizations operating in the realms of privacy protection, censorship circumvention, secure digital communications, and public-interest digital infrastructure development, as stated by the initiative's organizers, the Tor Project and Funding the Commons.
Launching on May 19, the fundraising initiative will welcome cryptocurrency donations in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR) and Golem (GLM).
This fundraising effort emerges at a time when privacy advocates maintain that internet freedom faces erosion worldwide. Internet shutdowns, encompassing long-term systemic censorship measures, impacted over half of the global population in 2025.
At the same time, governments worldwide are "increasingly exerting control over the technology that people depend on to access the free and open internet," Freedom House reported.
Quadratic funding model for fairness
A starting matching pool of $115,000 backed by Cake Wallet, Zcash Community Grants, Logos and Octant will magnify contributions received through June 18 through a "participatory matching model" designed to incentivize widespread community engagement rather than favoring large individual contributors.
Through quadratic funding, the initiative employs a methodology that prioritizes participation breadth over contribution amount, which means 10 contributors donating $10 each carry more weight than a single donor contributing $100.
This methodology enhances funding for initiatives that receive backing from wider community involvement, "giving more people a meaningful voice in how funds are distributed," the coalition said.
Quadratic funding is one of Web3's answers to how critical infrastructure gets funded: Institutional money follows community signals, not the other way around.
David Casey, director of Funding the Commons
Operating as a nonprofit organization, the Tor Project works toward advancing human rights and digital freedoms by encrypting internet traffic using free and open-source technologies like Tor Browser.
Global internet freedom declines
Worldwide internet freedom has experienced deterioration for 15 straight years, with conditions worsening in nearly 40% of the 72 nations evaluated in Freedom House's 2025 Freedom on the Net study.
The Asian region served as the principal center for digital censorship activities, with governmental authorities in 10 Asian nations, including China, India, North Korea, Thailand and Myanmar, implementing over 50 additional restrictions that impacted approximately 2 billion individuals.
Western nations are also experiencing heightened threats to internet freedom, exemplified by the US departure from the Freedom Online Coalition — an alliance explicitly committed to defending human rights and openness on the internet — in January.
Internet users are progressively adopting virtual private networks, or VPNs, as tools to bypass censorship, yet over a dozen nations actively prohibit or criminalize VPN usage, while numerous others enforce partial limitations.
During January, Iranian authorities implemented a countrywide internet shutdown aimed at suppressing widespread demonstrations over the economic crisis, which resulted in a dramatic increase in adoption of Bitchat, a decentralized peer-to-peer Jack Dorsey project that enables communication over Bluetooth.