The Tor Project

The Tor Project builds and maintains free software and open networks for online privacy. Tor routes traffic through multiple relays so users can browse, communicate, and publish without exposing a simple map of who they are and where they are connecting from, using a technique called onion routing.

Tor also matters to Bitcoin. Many Bitcoin nodes use onion services, so Tor's reliability and resilience affect Bitcoin's network privacy in practice.

Why fund it?

Privacy infrastructure is hard to fund. The Tor Project is a nonprofit, and work on onion service performance, reliability, and abuse resistance does not fit neatly into a commercial model.

OpenSats supported Tor in December 2022 through a dedicated support grant focused on onion services. The goal was to help Tor add developer capacity and improve infrastructure that many Bitcoin users and node operators already rely on.

What's next?

The work continues around onion service stability, denial-of-service resistance, metrics, and long-term maintainability.

If you want more background on why this work matters, read Tor's history page and its onion services overview.