April 11, 2024

ATOR joins the peaqosystem

peaq

Community

What is happening?

ATOR joins the peaqosystem to build the world’s largest DePIN for online privacy and unlock safe and private traffic for DePINs on peaq.

Why is it important?

As more and more people wake up to the evermore pervasive online surveillance, TOR-style anonymous routing is a Web3 use case with a lot of potential for growth — and doing the world a major service.

What does it mean for the community?

With ATOR joining in, the peaq community can be sure that the traffic on the DePINs they use is secure — and by joining ATOR, they can join the global push for online privacy and against the Big Tech censorship and control.

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A rising tide against online surveillance

Be it your friendly neighborhood government or the regular Big Tech suspects, everyone is out for data these days. Your data, more specifically. There’s more and more eyes on everything we do online and offline, and not everyone is equally happy to let us access the Web unhindered. And if you wanted to make those eyes cry, you’d be quite appropriate to get yourself an onion — or onion routing, rather.

Onion routing works by running your traffic through a network of relays, each of which adds a layer to encryption for it (hence “onion” in the name) and helps hide where it came from. The Tor Project has championed this approach; driven by pro-anonymity engineers and activists around the world, it deserves respect as a tool that has helped millions around the world. However, it is not without its flaws, bottlenecked by its limited supply of volunteer relay nodes and largely limited to web browsers.

ATOR harnesses the onion routing technology, tapping the DePIN model to build a growing, incentivized network of relay nodes. Its network does not rely on centralized authority nodes, which keep track of the relays and can be targeted in an attack. Instead, ATOR leverages a fully-distributed architecture that makes it more resilient and secure. It is also primed for working as an interoperable anonymity layer for dApps and other DePINs, enabling them to natively tap the ATOR network for routing through its SDK. And the best part is, all of that is coming to peaq.

As part of its integration with peaq, ATOR will expand its liquidity to the network, bridging its token with the layer-1 for DePINs. This would enable the DePINs building on peaq to leverage the network as a plug-and-play privacy layer, routing and encrypting their traffic through ATOR’s community-owned relays. ATOR will also explore tapping peaq’s multi-chain IDs and other Modular DePIN Functions for its own DePIN of relays.

“Online surveillance and privacy infringements are growing more egregious by the day. And over half of internet users consider it to be a priority. As DePINs transform industries and connected infrastructure, they must offer their communities a level of privacy without compromising the user experience. With ATOR, DePINs building on peaq will be able to do just that, and we are excited to be moving ahead with this integration.”

— Saunder, Engineering Lead at ATOR

“Secure and anonymous traffic is a major component of Web3’s promise of a more privacy-focused and self-sovereign Internet. ATOR’s anonymity stack makes it a valuable architecture component for any DePIN, and we are certain that it will create a lot of value for the ecosystem.”

— Till Wendler, co-founder of peaq

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