OnionDAO has been incentivizing people to run Tor exit nodes since April 2022. Currently, we do so by giving out POAPs, which caused us to attract enough people to run about 10% of Tor exit nodes. The Tor network provides a secure and anonymous way to connect to the internet. It is designed to defeat censorship and to make privacy accessible. Many of us have a background in Ethereum staking. We are philosophically aligned with the Tor network, but we operate independently from the Tor project.

One of Tor's pitfalls is that the nodes that run the network are run by volunteers, which means that the bandwidth available to users always has a bottleneck. In particular, Exit nodes are in short supply. Mostly because they are perceived as more risky by many people since they fetch all the network requests of Tor users. To a seasoned node operator, however, this is not scary at all. And all most need is a little nudge, a token of appreciation. OnionDAO attempts to provide those, the first of which has been monthly POAPs.

What prompted the creation of OnionDAO?

When the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, many of us felt confused and often powerless. We were not sure what's what, but we did know this: everyone should be able to access the internet in an uncensored way in order to make sense of what is going on. We wondered "What is something that we can uniquely do that others can't or won't", and our answer was to run Exit nodes, to support a level information playing field for everyone involved.

Learn more and discuss OnionDAO on discuss.octant.app.