avatarATOR Protocol

Summarize

Building The Future of Internet Privacy: A New Vision.

Following the unprecedented growth, development and adoption of ATOR Protocol thus far, and following restrictions imposed by a centralized group of individuals on Tor, we have decided to direct our momentum towards the development of our own decentralized peer-to-peer routing network. Developing our own privacy network allows us to build a highly scalable, fast, secure privacy web portal, supercharged by the projected tens of thousands of relays that will be onboarded over the next year.

Launched shortly before ETH Denver, ATOR sought to leverage the power of web3 to empower anonymity for as many people as possible, and we looked to Tor as the first network to focus on. ATOR has experienced immense traction since its inception, with over 2000 registered relays in testnet complementing the 6000 relays active on the Tor network prior, a unique web/decentralized protocol to deliver rewards, and the creation of bespoke hardware to lower the barrier of entry and bootstrap a global network.

However, the direction of the Tor Project has been the opposite of our decentralized movement. In recent days, the Tor Directory Authorities have revealed the power and centralized will to shut down over 1000 of its own active relays due to our growth. We have full respect for the founders, team and contributors to the Tor Project, and great appreciation for the network they have created. But we have found aspects of the operations of the Tor Network inherently against the vision of trustless decentralization we sought out to empower.

Hence, ATOR moves forward in developing the anonymous routing network that Tor was built to be: not a static, plateaued and limited network, but a vast, expanding, global protocol, that rewards every relay within it for contributing their computing power. Over the past few months, we have built a dedicated team and initiated the process of scoping out this new vision for anonymous, trustless, routing. All of our development remains intact — our protocol is use-case agnostic, and our hardware is specified perfectly for the new relay network — we continue on with the same momentum as before to build a global VPN network for all.

Centralized Ethos and Erratic Influence

Our testnet phase has allowed us to understand the architecture of Tor and how relays work. All relays are given clearance by a set of privileged servers called Directory Authorities. However, these Directory Authorities are managed by a small select group of trusted individuals and organizations within the Tor community. A subset of Directory Authorities called Bandwidth Authorities assign relay consensus weight, which ultimately determines the bandwidth that goes through them. These operators are well-known and respected for their commitment to privacy and security, but have an outsize influence on the flow of traffic within the Tor network and can be influenced by members of the Tor Project. As a result, any relays deemed unwanted by the Tor Project team can be effectively excluded from consensus weight and bandwidth, or even excluded outright from the network.

This misalignment was uncovered during the current testnet phase of our protocol, when the Tor Project committee stealthily changed their evaluation criteria for relays within their policy as a way to prevent the growth of ATOR relays, and were able to leverage the full set of Directory Authorities to blanket-ban over 1000 active relays without outside communication or an indication to the affected relays.

There have been 4500 to 6500 relays on the Tor network for the best part of the last two decades. This limited number of relays is one of the reasons why the network is regarded by many as painfully slow and user experience not desirable. In fact, it has been highlighted many times that relay operators voluntarily run relays don’t get compensated. The Tor team have shown little signs of encouraging ideas on incentivization and scale to support the relay operators, instead relying on donations to pay their staff, but not most of the relay operators. Worryingly, their heavy reliance on government grant funding means their operational ethos can be seen as contradictory to their stated mission.

Our Vision for Trustless Privacy

Whilst we have great regard for the care and caution exhibited by the Tor Project in supporting their network, we ultimately want to build an anonymous routing entity that is secured by something more powerful than committee meetings, closed-door agreements, and autonomous individuals — we want to build a self-scaling, trustless network that can never be compromised or limited. Though Tor has a myriad of users, there are still huge barriers to entry that have limited the vast majority of internet users from making it their default browsing choice — through a combination of speed, reliability and ease-of-use (in part through our bespoke hardware) — we want to build the decentralized, trustless network that can truly disrupt the VPN market and then open up private browsing to billions.

What has taken Tor 20 years to encourage 6500 relays on their network will take us months. The tokenomics paper outlines how the ATOR token will drive ATOR’s relay network and this will drive ATOR’s own routing network. The routing network will be a platform for privacy centric web services and applications and the token being the fuel in which these services and applications function and proliferate. We envision that network will be a launchpad for a variety of different privacy oriented services and applications: circuits for video streaming and sharing, private messaging, private email, file transfer and storage, and decentralized marketplaces. The vision we outlined for a global movement of internet services towards Tor will become even more seamless — the foundation for services and rapid relay onboarding to realize them will be built-into our protocol.

We have demonstrated in the 8 months since our fair-launch that we can build a novel cross-chain, scalable protocol, industry-standard hardware and initiate rapid relay expansion through education and our incredible community, all in parallel and with growing momentum. Everything we have built so far will form the basis of our new network.

Indeed, we have been planning this move over the past few months, successfully onboarding the talented Forte Group and doubling the size of our engineering team to rapidly iterate this novel protocol. And with our low-power, plug and play relay devices we have a unique edge to rapidly onboard new participants who wish to support global decentralized privacy, remain private themselves, and earn a passive income.

What might seem unfortunate in the short term is an acceleration of the inevitable and the best move that could happen for our project. We now have the ability to not just bootstrap a network for the millions of users on Tor, but build, from the ground up, a network that is truly built for global participation, highly scalable and in keeping with the principles of anonymity for billions.

Recommended from ReadMedium