Tor proved a crowd can fund internet freedom: how to help

The Tor Project just showed that internet freedom does not need a government cheque to survive. Its first participatory funding round raised more than 200,000 dollars, and 174,536 of that went straight to ten projects that fight censorship and surveillance. The striking part is who paid: 580 ordinary people, average donation 41 dollars. If you want the tools that get people online under a block to keep running, here is where and how to help, from zero effort to running your own infrastructure.

Why community money matters now

For years the biggest anti-censorship tools leaned on a handful of large funders, much of it from US internet-freedom programmes. When that support was largely cut in 2025, the whole field suddenly looked fragile: a few budget decisions could switch off bridges and circumvention tools that millions rely on. Tor ran the round from 19 May to 18 June 2026 using quadratic funding, a model that counts how many people give, not how deep one wallet is. A 115,000 dollar matching pool then multiplied the small donations. The result is a proof that a crowd can keep these tools alive without any single sponsor holding the switch.

Where the money went

The ten funded projects are the everyday toolbox of circumvention and safe communication: Onion Browser, Unredacted, Osservatorio Nessuno, Paskoocheh, OpenArchive, SecureDrop, Ricochet Refresh, OONI, OnionShare and Miaan Group. Some measure censorship, some move files or messages past it, some publish safely from inside blocked countries. Supporting them is legal: these are privacy and press-freedom tools, not a way to break any law.

How to help, from easiest to hands-on

• Run a Snowflake proxy (no skills needed). Snowflake is a browser add-on for Chrome and Firefox. Install it, leave it on, and your spare bandwidth quietly becomes a stepping stone for someone in a censored country to reach Tor. No configuration, no personal risk, no account. This is the single easiest way to help another person get online today.
• Donate money. Give once or monthly at donate.torproject.org. Cards and crypto are both accepted (the round took BTC, ETH, ZEC, XMR and GLM), and a paid membership adds a steady monthly income the project can plan around. Even 5 dollars a month, times a crowd, is exactly what worked here.
• Run a bridge or a relay. If you have a spare server or a stable connection, a Tor bridge or relay adds real capacity to the network. It needs a little setup and some bandwidth, and the guides at community.torproject.org walk you through it. Bridges in particular are what censored users connect to when the main network is blocked.
• Use the tools and tell others. Every extra person on Tor makes the crowd harder to single out, so simply using Tor Browser helps. So does pointing friends and journalists at OONI to measure blocks, SecureDrop for tips and OnionShare to send files privately.
• Back the whole ecosystem. The participatory round lives at internetfreedom.torproject.org, where you can follow the next round and support several projects at once rather than picking just one.