The Anon Network

In conjunction with the newly onboarded Forte Group, ATOR is now building its own anonymization network.

The Anon Network will use onion routing, a system which masks your IP address from all participants in the network, whether it’s the end user or any external third parties, thus allowing you to browse completely anonymously and keeps your information secure. ATOR's onion routing will function primarily with a 3-hop system, with data encrypted multiple times, once for each relay in the circuit, such that no single relay in the system can reliably infer both the sender and recipient. This maintains complete anonymity for users browsing or using services.

Incentives to Scale

All relays that participate in our onion-routing network will be rewarded for the useful bandwidth they provide to the network in the ATOR token. We will develop a consensus weight metric - Proof of Uptime - encompassing each relay's advertised bandwidth against collective measurements taken by other relays. Crucially, we will decentralize this process through a verification-game to eliminate the ability for a single party to throttle the bandwidth of specific relays, instead introducing collective mechanisms to throttle malicious relays.

ATOR recognition forms an effective incentive for contributing bandwidth to the network. The incentives are carefully balanced by our tokenomics paper which limit the total outflow of tokens to relays, creating a self-balancing equilibrium where the number of active relays scales up to match the value of rewards. The ATOR recognition rewards, distributed via the ATOR Protocol, is the flywheel that will see ATOR scale massively into becoming the fastest and most usable onion routing network worldwide. With over 1000 distinct relays registered with us in just 2 months, just in testnet, we have already proven our thesis in how incentives, education and a community can scale a privacy network.

Read more about the anticipated scale of relays in our Tokenomics Paper

Truly Decentralized

The Anon Network embodies the principle of decentralization, distinguishing itself by not having a single controlling entity. Instead of relying on centralized directory authorities, ATOR innovatively adopts decentralized directory authorities, potentially recorded directly onto the blockchain. This approach democratizes the role of directory authority, allowing the collective validation of the network to become the trusted authority, while remaining resistant to DDoS or sybil attacks.

Further enhancing this structure is the incorporation of blockchain's inherent features - transparency, tamper-resistance, and distributed consensus. These qualities ensure that the network remains robust against centralized control and manipulation. The decentralized nature of ATOR not only increases its resilience against attacks but also promotes a more egalitarian and user-empowered framework. This is an area of active research that is being practically implemented within the ATOR network.

Building on DePin

Rapid and consistent growth in the total number of relays is a crucial part in growing the total routing power and diversity of our network. ATOR will release relay operation packages for a range of architectures, allowing both x64 and ARM hardware to join our network as a relay. In conjunction with our partner, Hotspotty, ATOR will endeavour to convert 'dead' DePin hardware across the world and make them operate with ATOR.