Help us keep internet freedom tools alive to ensure free speech flourishes
Blueprint for Free Speech has joined a group of like-minded projects exploring a new way to fund internet freedom and make sure that freedom of expression flourishes, unrestricted by censorship and intrusive surveillance.
Millions of people around the world depend on internet freedom tools to access the open web and for private communication and secure file sharing.
In 2025, global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year, and tens of millions of dollars in public funding for internet freedom projects was cut. Organisations building tools that protect journalists, activists, human rights defenders and ordinary people are facing existential funding shortfalls. Without innovative ways of support, many critical projects could shut down and put millions of people at risk.
That’s why the Tor Project and Funding the Commons are launching a community-powered crowdfunding campaign to support some of these tools, starting May 19, 2026. This marks the first-ever Web3-native crowdfunding campaign benefitting the internet freedom ecosystem.
Blueprint has joined this decentralised, people-powered campaign because of the urgent need for new funding models to support the critical digital public infrastructure and services that keep the internet open and secure, including the tools that we build so that people can access the open web and engage in private and anonymous communication and file sharing.
Blueprint works internationally to safeguard freedom of expression for whistleblowers, journalists, human rights defenders and activists. A key pillar of our work is to promote free information flow between whistleblowers and journalists to ensure public interest disclosures can have the greatest possible impact while limiting the risk of retaliation. To this end, Blueprint has sponsored the development of two tools – Ricochet Refresh and Gosling.
Ricochet Refresh, is an open-source application that allows for private and anonymous messaging which is easy to use and metadata resistant, and Gosling is a tool that offers software developers the ability to add anonymity to the service they provide.
Ricochet is one of the only free open-source applications that allows unlimited file size transfer on a fully anonymised basis, using the Tor network. This is incredibly important in this age of military-grade spyware being used on an industrial scale to target government critics under the guise of fighting terror or organised crime, as the latest research shows.
Donors to the campaign can contribute ETH, BTC, or other cryptocurrencies to support Blueprint projects like Ricochet Refresh and Gosling. Funding the Commons and the Tor Project have been reaching out to companies to donate to a match pool. As a result, every donation will be matched, to be distributed among the 11 participating projects.
Thanks to quadratic funding, whereby an algorithm distributes matching funds by prioritising how many people support a project and not how much money it receives, even a 1$ donation can be matched with tens or even hundreds of dollars in additional funding. Instead of rewarding projects with the largest donations, those with the most contributors are rewarded.
Donate & vote at http://internetfreedom.torproject.org/ before June 18.
About Ricochet Refresh and Gosling
Ricochet Refresh is a peer-to-peer instant messaging application that prioritises user privacy and user control by design. The application and protocol are completely decentralised and do not depend on any third-party infrastructure apart from the Tor network itself. All messages are automatically secure and private, nobody knows who you talk to or what you say, none of your contacts know your location or IP address, and there are no servers to trust, monitor or hack.
Ricochet’s architecture makes it particularly valuable for protecting freedom of expression among whistleblowers, activists and journalists worldwide who face surveillance risks. Ricochet-Refresh also bundles the Tor Project's censorship-circumvention tools to enable connectivity even in constrained network environments.
For more information and to download Ricochet Refresh, visit the project website: https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/
Gosling is an open-source library that allows software developers to provide anonymous, secure and private peer-to-peer functionality using Tor onion services. It serves as both a research project and practical internet building block to create a functional prototype with improved privacy and anonymity that can be tested and verified.
For more information about Gosling, visit the project page:
