Why Paylinks runs only on Tor
Anonomi Paylinks runs exclusively as a Tor onion service. Creating a paylink, managing one, and donating through one all happen on the onion website. The clearnet website carries the Paylinks documentation and explains where to go, but cannot perform any of those actions.
Onion addresses
Section titled “Onion addresses”Website:
http://dwbgp2zfjqxcrk6fk3j7tr5uyqes4lxkipnsvm6atyi5eo7smsa6ykqd.onion/Paylinks (create):
http://dwbgp2zfjqxcrk6fk3j7tr5uyqes4lxkipnsvm6atyi5eo7smsa6ykqd.onion/paylinks/createOnion addresses open only in Tor Browser. Verify an address character by character against a copy published in this documentation before using it — a donation service is exactly the kind of target worth impersonating.
Why Tor only?
Section titled “Why Tor only?”A donation service should not depend on DNS or certificate authorities
Section titled “A donation service should not depend on DNS or certificate authorities”Running on clearnet means depending on a domain name, a registrar, and a certificate authority. Any of those can be seized, pressured, or misissued, and none of them are under the project’s control. A Tor v3 onion address is derived from the service’s own key: if you have the right address, you are talking to the right service, with nothing in between to trust.
Traffic isolation
Section titled “Traffic isolation”If you are using Tor for privacy, your browser should only ever talk to onion services. A clearnet donation endpoint would route donor traffic through exit nodes, which can be observed, and would expose donation activity to clearnet infrastructure. Keeping the whole flow inside Tor removes that exposure.
No cross-origin requests
Section titled “No cross-origin requests”The Paylinks API accepts requests only from the onion website’s origin. There is no configuration in which a clearnet page can reach it, which means there is no path for a clearnet page to be tricked into generating or disclosing donation addresses.
What this means for you
Section titled “What this means for you”Publishers
Section titled “Publishers”Create and manage your donate button on the onion website, using Tor Browser. The donate link it produces is an onion link, and your donors will need Tor Browser to open it.
Donors
Section titled “Donors”Donation links point at the onion website and open in Tor Browser. If a link claiming to be an Anonomi paylink points at a clearnet address, treat it as untrusted.
The retired clearnet service
Section titled “The retired clearnet service”Paylinks was previously available on clearnet as well, backed by a separate API. That service has been decommissioned, along with the host it ran on.
Two consequences:
- Paylinks created on the clearnet service no longer work, and neither do donate buttons pointing at them. Publishers who had one should create a replacement on the onion site and update their button.
- The clearnet Paylinks pages no longer submit anything. They explain the move and show the onion address instead of a form, so that no donation details are ever sent to a host the project has stopped operating.