The Stellar Development Foundation is matching donations in Lumens (XLM) made to six non-profits during April, including the Tor Project — the team behind ‘The Onion Router’ anonymizing browser.

Donations will be matched up to a total of 1.9 million XLM (roughly $79,300), with the foundation launching the initiative by donating 100,000 XLM ($4,200) to each of the charities

Stellar to match donations to Tor Project

On April 4, the Tor Project announced that the Stellar Development Foundation had pledged to match all XLM donations on a 1:1 basis this month.

Sarah Stevenson, fundraising director for Tor Project, tweeted that 20% of its individual donations come in the form of cryptocurrencies.

While Tor has accepted Bitcoin donations since 2013, the platform did not support alternative cryptocurrencies until March 2019.

Since then, the Tor Project has also accepted the contribution of eight altcoins including Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Dash (DASH), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Augur (REP) and Zcash (ZEC).

XLM donations matched for six non-profits

In addition to Tor, the Stellar Development will match donations to Unicef France, Freedom of the Press, Heifer International — an entity working to fight hunger by supporting small-scale agricultural producers, and Watsi — a group focused on building technology to streamline healthcare financing, and Women Who Code — an organization devoted to encouraging women to engage with the technology sector.

“There is no better time than now to dig deep and magnify the Stellar community’s impact on these nonprofits,” Stellar urges, adding: “They leaned out for us to use our new technology and now it's time for us to lean in for them.”

Crypto firms match coronavirus donations

A number of charitable initiatives targeting the coronavirus pandemic have seen crypto firms match public donations in recent weeks.

At the end of March, Binance launched the #CryptoAgainstCOVID campaign to purchase and distribute medical supplies to coronavirus hotspots with an initial donation of $1 million and pledge to match public contributions up to a further $1 million.

On March 14, Ethereum-based developer crowdfunding platform, Gitcoin, pledged to match donations toward projects comprising public health initiatives in its current round of grant funding.