According to the Tor Project’s latest annual report, the U.S. government remains the largest funder of the Tor Project

Recently, the Tor Project released its latest annual report, sharing the Tor Project's expenses and revenues for fiscal years 2020-2021. the Tor Project is proud to highlight that 87% of its revenues are related to program costs. This means that the majority of the Tor Project's expenses are directly related to building Tor, improving Tor, and ensuring that everyone has access to Tor.

The U.S. government remains the largest funder of the Tor Project, but its share has declined significantly to just 2% more than individual donations. This is evident from the latest annual report of the Tor Project, the organization that manages the Tor network (pdf). More than two million people use Tor every day to protect their privacy.

The Tor Project is a nonprofit organization that exists solely on donations. In fiscal year 2020-2021, the organization received $7.4 million. Of that amount, more than $2.8 million (38 percent) came from the U.S. government, including the U.S. Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, the National Science Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, the Institute of Museum and Library Science, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

"We get a lot of questions about how the U.S. government funds the Tor Project (and also see a lot of FUD), so we wanted to make that as clear as possible," the Tor Project said in an earlier annual report on the role of the U.S. government. The organization has been working for years to reduce its reliance on U.S. government contributions. Last year, it even collected a record number of individual donations - more than $2.6 million (36 percent). If this trend continues, by next year, the Tor Project will have raised more money through individual donations than it receives from the U.S. government.

Expenditures for the 2020-2021 period will be approximately $4 million. The majority of this, about $3.5 million, is for services, including operations such as hosting, translation and software development. The remaining amount is for fundraising and administration, of which about $292,000 was spent on fundraising and about $217,000 on administration.

The Tor Project hopes to use this money for the development of the Tor Project. In the future, the project plans to adapt to changes in user behavior as they increasingly communicate through apps in their smartphones rather than using a browser for this purpose. the Tor project plans to develop a new Tor client as a standalone app that will allow users to route all phone traffic through Tor.

Another goal of the Tor project is to switch from Tor to the Rust programming language. Currently Tor is written in C, which is fundamentally insecure. Therefore, the Tor Project hopes to switch Tor to Rust through redevelopment. arti 1.0.0, a Rust rewrite of Tor, will be available later this year.

The Tor Project has released a story about Tor shared by an anonymous Russian user that highlights the importance of Tor.

"Tor helped me a lot. Here in Russia, blocking on the Internet is extremely common… Tor helps me bypass blocking and get more privacy. For example, many wonderful websites, such as foreign services or the websites of the Russian opposition, have been blocked. I have been using Tor for many years… without it, many very important sources of useful information would be inaccessible, or accessible with great difficulty."