Tor launches its first crowdfunding campaign as it seeks to be less reliant on US government funds
Ashley Carman / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
The crowdfunding push closes out a rough year for Tor's infrastructure strategy: months earlier it had shut down Tor Cloud, the EC2-powered service that let users donate spare bandwidth for anonymous browsing, leaving the project more dependent on institutional money than on volunteers' hardware.
Executive director Shari Steele has since framed diversifying funding sources alongside repairing public perception after the CMU attack as core priorities, making this campaign the first test of whether Tor's user base will pay for the network it uses.
First-order effects
- Individual users become direct funders of Tor for the first time, and the campaign's outcome sets a measurable baseline against government grant dependence — one the project later cleared by raising over $200,000.
- Tor gains an accountability channel beyond grant reporting: crowdfunded backers expect transparency on priorities like post-CMU security work.
Second-order effects
- A successful campaign strengthens Steele's hand in pushing the funding-diversification agenda she outlined publicly, shifting internal budget decisions away from any single sponsor's preferences.
- Other nonprofit privacy projects get a template to follow — though the modest total also shows small-dollar giving alone cannot yet replace institutional grants at scale.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anonymity infrastructure migrates toward blended funding models where grassroots campaigns cap, rather than replace, government support — reducing the leverage any single state sponsor has over censorship-resistance tooling.
The trend: Privacy infrastructure projects are hedging against state-funding dependence by building direct donor bases, with crowdfunding results determining how quickly they can rebalance.