Tor, short for “The Onion Router,” is an open source privacy network that permits users to browse the web anonymously. Tor was initially developed and solely used by the U.S. Navy to protect sensitive government communications before the network was made available to the public.
Tor was founded in 2002 by Andrew Lewman and Roger Dingledine, and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#1 The core principle of Tor was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect U.S. intelligence communications online.

#2 In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.

#3 In May 2021, the Tor Project auctioned the first NFT-based darkweb site—Dusk. The auction ended with a winning bid of 500 ETH, valued at $1,737,995 in May 2021.