A group of organizations focused on privacy and internet freedom, spearheaded by the Tor Project, has launched a new cryptocurrency fundraising initiative to bolster digital infrastructure that resists censorship.
This pioneering Web3 crowdfunding effort for internet freedom tools will back 10 nonprofit initiatives working in areas like privacy, bypassing censorship, secure communications, and public-interest digital infrastructure, according to the campaign organizers, Tor Project and Funding the Commons.
The initiative, starting May 19, welcomes cryptocurrency donations in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), and Golem (GLM).
Tor Project communications director, Pavel Zoneff, told Cointelegraph that the collaboration with privacy-focused cryptocurrencies is a “natural fit.”
“The internet freedom projects we seek to support are inherently private, designed to shield individuals from some of the most aggressive surveillance and censorship powers globally … privacy coins like Zcash and Monero safeguard financial privacy,” he explained.
The campaign emerges as privacy advocates contend that internet freedom is being undermined worldwide. Internet shutdowns, including prolonged systemic censorship, impacted over half of the global population in 2025.
At the same time, governments worldwide are “increasingly asserting control over the technology people rely on to access the free and open internet,” Freedom House noted.
Quadratic funding model for fairness
An initial $115,000 matching pool, supported by Cake Wallet, Zcash Community Grants, Logos, and Octant, will boost donations made through June 18 using a “participatory matching model” to reward widespread community involvement rather than large individual contributions.
The campaign employs quadratic funding, a system that values the number of contributors over the size of their donations, meaning 10 people donating $10 each carry more weight than one person giving $100.
This approach amplifies support for projects with broader community backing, “granting more individuals a significant say in how funds are allocated,” the coalition stated.
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“Quadratic funding is one of Web3’s solutions for funding critical infrastructure: Institutional funding follows community signals, not the reverse,” said David Casey, director of Funding the Commons.
Tor fundraising director Al Smith told Cointelegraph that the connection between the cryptocurrency community and the Tor Project developed organically. “Many cryptocurrency initiatives utilize Tor to provide infrastructure-level privacy; for instance, over 60% of Bitcoin nodes use Onion Services. Given this existing relationship, we began exploring ways to mobilize privacy supporters within our shared communities.”
The Tor Project is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing human rights and freedoms online by encrypting internet traffic through free and open-source tools like Tor Browser.
Global internet freedom declines
Global internet freedom has declined for 15 consecutive years, with conditions worsening in nearly 40% of the 72 countries evaluated in Freedom House’s 2025 Freedom on the Net report.
Asia was the main center for digital censorship, with governments in 10 Asian nations, including China, India, North Korea, Thailand, and Myanmar, implementing over 50 new restrictions and impacting approximately 2 billion people.
Internet freedom in the West is also facing greater threats, with the US exiting the Freedom Online Coalition — an alliance explicitly committed to defending human rights and openness on the internet — in January.
Commenting on the US government’s reduction in internet freedom funding, Tor Project executive director Isabela Fernandes, told Cointelegraph:
“As a human rights organization, the Tor Project can reach a broad range of supporters. This has enabled us to build a diverse funding base and donor network, which lessens Tor’s dependence on any single funding source. This has helped the project navigate this period, but also placed a responsibility on us to help fortify the ecosystem around us–particularly smaller projects that may lack the same access to institutional funding or donor networks.”
Internet users are increasingly using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to bypass censorship, but more than a dozen countries actively block or criminalize VPN usage, while many others enforce partial restrictions.
The decline of internet freedom over the past 15 years. Source: Freedom House
In January, Iran enforced a nationwide internet blackout to quell mass protests over the economic crisis, resulting in a spike in usage of Bitchat, a decentralized peer-to-peer Jack Dorsey project that enables communication via Bluetooth.
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