The Tor Project, the nonprofit behind the most widely used anonymity network on the internet, is launching a crypto-native crowdfunding campaign to fund privacy and censorship-circumvention tools. The campaign runs from May 19 to June 18, 2026, and supports roughly 10 to 11 nonprofit projects working on everything from secure communications to public-interest digital infrastructure.
The organization whose browser gets launched approximately 4.8 million times daily has historically depended on traditional grants. This campaign represents a deliberate pivot toward decentralized funding, and it’s using quadratic funding to do it.
Quadratic funding meets internet freedom
The campaign uses quadratic funding, a model that prioritizes the number of unique donors over the size of individual contributions. If 500 people each give $5, that project gets more matching funds than one whale dropping $2,500. The math rewards breadth of support, not depth of pockets.
The matching pool sits at $115,000, contributed by Cake Wallet, Zcash Community Grants, Logos, and Octant. Those matching dollars get distributed proportionally based on how many individual contributors back each project, not how much total money flows in.
