Tokenised Tor. Orchid Labs plans to become a decentralised Internet provider

Internet, which took decades to develop as a free platform for information exchange, more and more often is becoming an instrument of spying and censorship in the contemporary world. Orchid Labs, a California...

Internet, which took decades to develop as a free platform for information exchange, more and more often is becoming an instrument of spying and censorship in the contemporary world.

Orchid Labs, a California startup, is planning to create a decentralised internet provider. The company is developing a P2P protocol for a network whose participants will act as both traffic providers and traffic consumers. A special ERC20-based ORC token has been created for internal settlements. A peer-to-peer traffic provision architecture will make redundant such internet blocking circumvention means as Tor and VPN.

April 20, Orchid Labs raised $36 million at the SAFT stage during which investors received the rights to the company’s assets (tokens) which will be issued in the future. Only Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accredited investors were allowed to trade. The total of $125mln will be required to launch the project. In October 2017, the company got $4.7mln worth of venture financing from several firms.

The Orchid founders are convinced that their product will become a competitor to the Tor network whose anonymity may be compromised in the case of insufficient nodes. The service may also become an alternative to VPN services whose users have to rely on the provider’s integrity.

Orchid CEO Steven Waterhouse is confident that a decentralised internet is needed not only in highly censored countries, such as China. Today, confidentiality begins to be valued by users across the globe. The scandal around Facebook users’ personal data leaks has shown what kind of damage can be done by imperfect confidentiality policies both to users and to the company itself. Waterhouse says that he seriously got down to working on internet security after he got hacked himself.