With each passing day, cryptocurrencies take another step towards global adoption. Little by little, these digital assets are cementing their place as viable and sustainable payment methods for several industries and businesses around the world. Even nonprofit organizations and projects are accepting crypto as donations.

Such is the case of the Tor Project, which is a browsing tool that looks for full anonymity by a system of nodes and relays. According to its website, the entity will accept donations in the form of cryptocurrencies in a direct way. There will be nine different digital assets in which people will be able to make their contributions to the project.

Diversifying the Donations Process

Users can find the list of accepted cryptocurrencies in the TOR website. The options have been public since March 18th, 2019, and provide the project with a more versatile approach at the moment of receiving donations to fund development activities and other expenses.

Sarah Stevenson, the project’s fundraising Director, explained to a prominent crypto news site that Tor has been accepting Bitcoin for quite some time now (a few years, actually.) However, as new options consolidate themselves in the market, Tor has decided to add them. And whilst in the past, donations were processed via BitPay, they will now be sent directly to Tor.

Using the Kraken Exchange to Convert Funds

That way, Tor will receive the funds in the form of cryptocurrencies and convert them via the Kraken exchange, according to Stevenson. The executive also explained that people contributing to Tor asked for direct wallet addresses and for more options to donate.

“We decided to accept cryptocurrency because more and more donors requested that option. The Tor Project and the cryptocurrency communities both value privacy, so it makes sense,” she observed. The new payment methods for donations will be Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero, Stellar Lumens, Zcash and the Augur project’s REP tokens, besides Bitcoin.

Tor is not a company that has a huge staff; hence, its objectives were actually quite specific at the moment of taking the decision to add the mentioned options. Stephenson said that “we focused on two things: the return on investment of time and effort and the coins donors had specifically requested. We are currently limiting the number of separate wallets we need to monitor and manage and also only accepting currencies that can be converted to fiat via Kraken.”

The TOR Browser Explained

Tor’s modus operandi is actually right in line with the concept of cryptocurrencies: digital anonymity. The resource encrypts traffic so the users’ traffic is kept private and away from third-parties and external agents looking to take advantage of it.

Tor is best defined as a decentralized network that users can install via software. Once enabled, it will let the user access the “dark web,” which has pages and services that are not commonly found on the usual search engines. The tool performs its encryption through a set of nodes, or relays, which will take some time to reach the final destination, but will provide anonymity because the communication is set through a random, virtually untraceable path.

Browsing in the TOR network will enhance the user’s privacy and anonymity, but traffic will be considerably slower than using an unencrypted network because of the process that it takes for the connection request to reach the final “node” or destination. Tor means “The Onion Router.”

By Andres Chavez

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