Tor has been integral to cryptocurrency from Bitcoin’s inception. ATOR is the cryptocurrency that gives back. 

ATOR provides one of the most compelling investor propositions of any cryptocurrency released recently and is uniquely positioned to transform how the world uses the internet. 

Tor and Its perception.

Before I discovered the ATOR Project and entered the rabbit-hole of internet privacy and anonymity initiatives, my perception of the internet matched that of most people. I was led to believe that Tor was synonymous with the dark web, mainly sought to be used for illegal activities. Hearing stories of the Silk Road marketplace led me to believe Tor was a tool for hackers and criminals to cloak themselves in anonymity. Certainly not something that ordinary people should use, let alone need, in their day-to-day lives.

As I become better informed on ATOR, I’ve found my views on Tor reverse completely. Tor is simply a protocol for encryption and decryption, providing a method for users of the internet a way to keep their online activity private and confidential. Tor works by sending user internet requests through multiple servers (Tor relays) around the world, obscuring everything but the previous and next server, making it impossible for a destination packet to be tracked back to the user who made the request. This enables full privacy and security for the user, allowing them to be more in control of our data and internet presence. That is not something that only bad-actors should seek – as we all become increasingly monetised for our data, against our consent and interest, privacy should be normal.

Enter ATOR.

The ATOR Project enables Tor to be more accessible to users, by addressing the two, self-explanatory blockers to mainstream Tor adoption:

1)  Adoption: Insufficient people using Tor, either because of lack of understanding of its importance, or the inconvenience associated with it.

2)  Provision: Insufficient Tor relays to properly obfuscate mass internet traffic at speed.

Poetic in its simplicity, this problem hits the ‘global problem trinity’ on the head: the problem affects a potentially huge market (every internet user!); the problem is currently heavily underserved (only 6000 Tor relays are typically active, entirely funded by volunteer activity, and insufficient even for Tor’s current daily usership of 2 million); and the problem can be fixed in a small way and then scale up (you don’t need the entire world to use a given protocol to make progress or grow Tor, it can be incremental). The vision and focus on internet anonymity alone stands above the vast majority of cryptocurrency projects, that often focus on DeFi specific processes and nothing more.

ATOR’s solution to this problem is elegant but technically ambitious.

On the problem of adoption, ATOR is building their own router, a hardware ‘hotspot’ that uses existing WIFI to act as a middleman between consumer devices and Tor, and continually encourage community education on the importance of internet anonymity and privacy. Indeed, the ATOR token is explicitly called a mechanism for ‘recognition’ to recognise these efforts to educate at scale.

For provision, anyone who runs a Tor relay are recognised for their contribution with ATOR tokens, accordance to a Proof-of-Uptime mechanism, providing an incentive to contribute to Tor. To facilitate even more rapid adoption, ATOR will create their own relay hardware that can be purchased with the ATOR token and come preconfigured, widening the pool of potential consumers significantly.

ATOR recognises that Tor is already a powerful tool for protecting online privacy and security, and that it simply needs more people and distributed hardware around the to become even more effective.

Short Term: Incomparable value proposition to crypto investors.

The potential appeal for ATOR’s provision solutions especially cannot be overstated. From a crypto-centric perspective, ATOR are building custom hardware that users can buy to mine a cryptocurrency, with much lower power than any proof-of-work protocol, while also contributing to a noble cause. This echoes very closely with another hardware-focused cryptocurrency project, Helium HNT, with an all-time-high market cap of 6.2 billion. Users globally speculated heavily, and an immense number of investors ordered their hardware at significant markup to be able to ‘mine’ a crypto from their own homes. Ironically, Helium’s own network which the hardware contributed to, has experienced little to no adoption. This is in sharp contrast to ATOR who, instead of soloing themselves into their own network, are building hardware for Tor which already has millions of daily users. This appeal both morally and speculatively has no peer. 

Long Term: Transforming how the world uses the internet.

For all of its notable achievements and contribution to countless whistleblowing and censorship-resistant efforts, and considering its imprint in the public psyche, Tor has an unbelievably small number of live relays at any one point, almost always below 10k. The potential for ATOR-incentivized relays to become a significant, or even majority, part of Tor is not unfathomable. Especially as, in addition to existing Tor relays able to sign their ETH wallets with the protocol, ATOR will release their own Tor relay hardware.

As the world becomes more attuned to the importance of internet privacy, and the release of browsers and clients that make Tor use easier, and as congestion issues begin to resolve themselves, the potential for a great many more users making Tor their default internet experience is high. ATOR can truly transform how the internet is used.

Progress So Far

Just over a month into release, ATOR is still in its infancy. But their progress has been rapid. The team demonstrated working router and relay prototypes at ETH Denver, have spoken to the founder of Tor, onboarded engineers currently building the relay registration protocol, demonstrated on-chain links to the multibillion IOST project and Vitalik himself, and launched their ERC20 token currently at 10-million market cap- over 500x smaller than Helium’s all-time-high. The risk-reward ratio from an investment perspective is difficult to ignore,