Comment by simoncion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simoncion | Hacker News Reader

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> The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.

glances over at their supporters page [0]... I mean, that's not literally impossible.

While it is true that Mullvad supports at "Shallot Onion" -and has since mid 2023- [1] and "Shallot Onion" is Tor Project's highest support tier, we don't know how much Mullvad is paying. Six years ago, the smallest amount one could donate to get into that tier was 100k USD [2]. In contrast, just one of their eleven (or twelve, depending on how you count the two listed US State Department entities) supporters provided 500k USD per year in 2022->2024, and "committed" to providing 750k USD per year in 2025->2027... until -one assumes- DOGE canceled that grant in its "efficiency" sweeps.

FUTO is another of the eleven-ish entities on that page. While FUTO doesn't seem to mention how much it granted to the Tor Project, their grants page [3] claims that they've granted five million USD to twenty entities in their "Legendary Grants" -er- program, for an average of 250k USD per entity.

There's a lot that we don't know about the details of the financial situation of the Tor Project... but while it's possible that they become captured by Mullvad's money, it seems unlikely to me.

[0] <https://www.torproject.org/about/supporters/>

[1] <https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/3/3/mullvad-becomes-highest...>

[2] <https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.org...>

[3] <https://futo.tech/grants>

> we don't know how much Mullvad is paying.

Yes we do; it's listed on Tor's IRS Form 990. $306,225 in 2025.

https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2025/208/096/2025-20809...

Oh, rad! I had forgotten that that information would appear on publicly-accessible tax documents. Thanks for digging that up. How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?

I see that the 1.5 million USD State Department grant is listed on that return. I do hope that they weren't obligated to return that. The Award History section here [0] suggests that they were, but I don't know much at all about how these sorts of grants work.

Anyway. This is where Tor Project seems to officially publish their tax documents [1], but I can only find docs up to 2023->2024...

Notable is that in 2023->2024 (the year prior to the document you link to) Mullvad's funding was 1.4 million USD, whereas in 2024->2025, Mullvad's funding was 306 thousand USD. In that year, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency provided nearly twice the funding that Mullvad did! Perhaps Mullvad donated a enormously large amount of money in 2025->2026, but, yeah, the numbers don't support the "the Tor Project will start censoring because Mullvad is paying them so much" story.

Again, thanks for digging up that tax return.

[0] <https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_2534285_049#award...>

[1] <https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/>

> How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?

I searched "tor 990", found the same [1] you did with stale data, and knew from past experience I could find the latest on GuideStar. 990s are really useful when doing due diligence on non-profits before making donations. In an ideal world, they'd be easy to find directly on irs.gov, but, alas.

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