Tribler is a research project of Delft University of Technology. Tribler was created over nine years ago as a new open source Peer-to-Peer file sharing program. During this time over one million users have installed it successfully and three generations of Ph.D. students tested their algorithms in the real world.

Tribler is the first client which continuously improves upon the aging BitTorrent protocol from 2001 and addresses its flaws. We expanded it with, amongst others, streaming from magnet links, keyword search for content, channels and reputation-management. All these features are implemented in a completely distributed manner, not relying on any centralized component. Still, Tribler manages to remain fully backwards compatible with BitTorrent.

Work on Tribler has been supported by multiple Internet research European grants. In total we received 3,538,609 Euro in funding for our open source self-organising systems research.

Roughly 10 to 15 scientists and engineers work on it full-time. Our ambition is to make darknet technology, security and privacy the default for all Internet users. As of 2013 we have received code from 46 contributors and 143.705 lines of code.