Supporting the Tor network with a $50,000 donation to the Tor Project

When we started building Samourai Wallet in 2015 one of our first priorities was to enable the software to work through the Tor network for increased user privacy and protection. Tor was still a little hairy on mobile at that time, but using a third party app (Orbot) our users were able to make use of Tor with the wallet.

A few years later, Samourai Wallet was the first mobile bitcoin wallet to include Tor as fully integrated functionality, meaning users no longer needed to have a third party app installed. They could route all traffic through Tor with the simple press of a button. This dramatically increased the number of users making use of Tor.

Since then we have released Samourai Dojo, a full bitcoin node based wallet back-end that can power your Samourai Wallet and runs natively over the Tor network. We also released Samourai Whirlpool, a blinded Chaumian CoinJoin implementation that requires Tor to function properly. Earlier this year we released Samourai Soroban, a Tor based encrypted message passing system designed for use in peer2peer CoinJoin transactions that are available in the wallet.

All of the free and open source software that Samourai releases makes heavy use of the free and open source Tor software maintained by the Tor Project. We are proud to announce today that we are able to support the work of the Tor Project with a $50,000 USD donation and joining the project as a “Vidalia Onion” member.

We’re proud to have been able to give back to one of the most important technologies available in reclaiming and preserving your privacy. To make your own donation to the Tor Project visit https://donate.torproject.org/