The Torex Protocol

The Problem

In the age of big data, censorship, and the monetization of our internet activity, privacy and self-sufficiency has increasingly become a luxury. It is becoming clearer that, so long as internet users rely on protocols administered by large corporations, built with privacy as an afterthought, it cannot be achieved. A truly open protocol must rely on independant relay operators to truly be considered decentralized.

To enhance the decentralization and increase the number of relays available for open protocols, Torex Protocol exists to educate and recognize relay operators world wide. Torex Protocol is a community of independent relay operators running open sourced protocols enhancing decentralization. Recognition tokens are rewarded to operators, who can choose to keep these tokens as a measure of their contribution, exchange them for our hardware or services on decentralized networks, or contribute to further education and outreach. With an initial focus on anonymity and security, our community started running Tor relays, as we build out support for the broader onion routing network. We will support other open open protocols as our community develops and becomes more decentralized.

Onion routing networks enable greater internet anonymity and censorship resistance by routing users’ internet activity through 3 independently operated ‘nodes’, while open protocols such as Nostr focuses on using relays to propagate social media and publications. Countless other decentralized alternatives for file sharing, computation models and more exist that could be empowered by the protocol. But whether for anonymity or autonomy, Torium Protocol strives to ensure privacy in interacting with the protocol regardless of the network.

Find out more about The Onion Router and its peer-to-peer routing network that makes it work on the foundation website. Note that Torium Protocol is not affiliated with The Tor Project

The Protocol

The Torex Protocol is built to recognize the useful contribution of relay operators to decentralized networks, through the distribution of Torex Protocol tokens. For supported protocols, such as Tor, operators register their relay with their BSC address and then continue operating as a relay.

Relay operators will then be able to see their measured contribution to the network as decentralized metrics published to Arweave, and will receive Torex Protocol recognition rewards accordingly. Torex Protocol is distributed on Arweave, backed by vaulted tokens on the BSC blockchain, and users can then choose to withdraw to their BSC wallet.