What if funding internet freedom wasn't driven by a few large donors, but by how many people showed up? What if $1 dollar could go as far as $100? Earlier this year, we set out to answer these questions by launching a participatory funding campaign. The goal was to test new funding mechanisms to support critical digital infrastructure at a moment of systemic funding instability.
The round officially closed on June 19th, and the results give us reason to be encouraged. Today, we can share that the community showed up: more than $200,000 USD has been raised in total, with $174,536 being distributed to participating grantee projects.
More than the total, what matters is how we got there: 580 unique donors made 662 contributions, with an average donation size of $41. The direct donation total was modest compared to a traditional Tor fundraising campaign, but that was baked into the design. Participation helped shape how matching funds were allocated (by using the quadratic funding algorithm), turning community support into financial impact for participating projects.
Why did we run this experiment?
There is an entire ecosystem of internet freedom tools that help people communicate safely, access information, document censorship, share files securely, and protect their privacy. These tools are often used as emergency infrastructure, but funded like optional projects.
Many depend on small teams doing difficult, long-term work that is invisible until urgently needed. When funding sources shift suddenly or disappear, the effects are immediate: teams reduce staffing, delay development, scale back infrastructure, and narrow support for the communities that depend on them.
That fragility became impossible to ignore after a major policy shift in 2025 disrupted long-standing funding for parts of the internet freedom community. Some projects had grants rescinded in the middle of active contracts. Others were suddenly forced to rethink whether they could continue operating at the same scale, or at all.
That highlighted a deeper problem with centralized funding. When public-interest infrastructure depends too heavily on one funder, a single decision can put essential work at risk---whether that funder is a government, foundation, company, or individual patron. For tools that people rely on in moments of crisis, that is not a sustainable model.
What the community made possible
We saw an opportunity to test new ways of sustaining public goods funding. Rather than replace traditional nonprofit funding, the campaign aimed at testing the impact of collective investment and shared responsibility in response to the challenges of funding for public-interest technology.
The campaign brought together privacy, internet freedom, cryptocurrency, and open-source communities to support 10 participating projects working across censorship circumvention, secure communications, secure journalism, and critical digital infrastructure.
Final project allocations are:
| Project | Direct donations | Donor units | QF share | Match | Total to project |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Onion Browser | $11,854 | 190 | 63.3% | $99,266 | $111,119 |
| Unredacted | $5,262 | 129 | 22.6% | $35,467 | $40,729 |
| Osservatorio Nessuno | $2,894 | 84 | 7.5% | $11,740 | $14,633 |
| Paskoocheh (ASL19) | $390 | 32 | 0.6% | $4,611 | $5,000 |
| OpenArchive | $462 | 23 | 0.4% | $4,538 | $5,000 |
| SecureDrop | $475 | 19 | 0.3% | $4,525 | $5,000 |
| Ricochet Refresh | $930 | 34 | 1.0% | $4,070 | $5,000 |
| OONI | $986 | 24 | 0.8% | $4,014 | $5,000 |
| OnionShare | $1,066 | 53 | 2.4% | $3,934 | $5,000 |
| Miaan Group | $2,628 | 23 | 1.2% | $2,372 | $5,000 |
| Total | $26,945 | 100% | $174,536 | $201,481 |
- 15% of funds raised were used to cover the staff and infrastructure to build and run the campaign. We kept it as low as possible while still running a secure, privacy-preserving campaign.
Visibility
One of the clearest outcomes from this round was the strength of community support for Onion Browser, which received the largest allocation. That result reflects both the project's role in facilitating Tor access on iOS and the way a participation-based model can amplify projects with strong name recognition and an existing audience. This also showed us where future rounds can improve.
However, some smaller or less widely known projects benefited from this campaign in important non-monetary ways by gaining visibility, followers, and direct outreach from people discovering their work for the first time.
Unredacted shared that many people appeared to discover the project for the first time, and that having the fundraiser visible in Tor Browser was especially valuable for visibility.
Osservatorio Nessuno said the campaign amplified its audience and led to new people getting in touch after discovering its work.
OONI confirmed that broader visibility may have helped increase its social media following, which in turn may have contributed to more OONI Probe installations and increased measurement coverage.
When more people understand what these projects do, why they matter, and how they fit into the larger ecosystem, the whole movement becomes stronger. For future rounds, we want to help discovery happen earlier and more evenly. In this round, we addressed part of that imbalance by raising the minimum distribution threshold to $5,000, ensuring that every participating project received support in recognition of the work required to take part in the campaign.
Participation
Quadratic funding is designed to reward broad participation, not only the size of individual donations. In practice, this means that a project backed by many contributors can receive more matching support than one supported by only a few larger gifts.
For this round, direct community donations totaled $26,945.29. Those donations helped unlock a larger matching pool, supported by our matchfunders, and influenced how matching funds were allocated across the participating projects.
Community donations came in through BTC, ETH, ZEC, XMR, and GLM: By value, the direct donations split about 52% Bitcoin, 27% Monero, 13% Ethereum, and 8% Zcash. Monero was invisible to the public tracker, yet made up more than a quarter of the total. The site's public total showed transparent chains only with about $19,620 raised. The roughly $7,300 that came in Monero then brings direct donations to about $27,000.
Thank you to our matchfunders
This campaign brought together communities that understand privacy, open infrastructure, and public goods as shared responsibilities. It showed what becomes possible when funders, users, and public-interest technology projects move together.
We are grateful to Cake Wallet, Ethereum Foundation, Logos, Octant, Xeovo and Zcash Community Grants for stepping forward and helping turn individual contributions into ecosystem-wide support. Their participation made it possible for small donations to carry more weight and for community support to influence how funds were distributed.
We also want to shout out Web3Privacy Now who acted as our media partner for this campaign. The non-profit amplified the campaign's reach with the production of four campaign videos and multiple testimonial videos featuring Naomi Brockwell, Eva Galperin, and Kurt Opsahl among others.
A few lessons stand out.
First, participation can meaningfully shape funding outcomes. The campaign showed that hundreds of individual donors can influence how support moves through an ecosystem, even when direct donation totals are relatively modest.
Second, discoverability needs to be designed more intentionally in future rounds: Tor-owned channels, including prominently featuring the campaign in Tor Browser, helped participating projects reach people who may not have encountered their work otherwise. That visibility created value beyond the dollars raised. But better-known projects entered this campaign with an advantage and benefited disproportionately from their visibility and existing community reach.
Third, this model is promising, but operationally complex. Multi-currency donations, privacy-preserving contributions, conversions, matching calculations, campaign infrastructure, and project-level reconciliation all take time and care. We waited to share final results because we wanted to provide accurate numbers.
These are exactly the kinds of lessons we hoped this experiment would surface. If internet freedom infrastructure needs more resilient funding models, we need to be honest about what works, what is hard, and what we can improve next time. For additional insights into the campaign,
This round has ended, but the work continues
You can still support the participating projects directly and help sustain the tools people rely on to communicate safely, access information, and resist censorship.
We are exploring what future rounds could look like. If your organization is interested in supporting internet freedom infrastructure through a future matching pool, we'd like to hear from you.
We are also interested in hearing from the broader ecosystem. If there are internet freedom projects, tools, or communities you believe should be part of a future round, let us know.
Thank you to everyone who showed up.
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