FUTO is the brainchild of Eron Wolf. Seriously, “Eron”? When they make up such names, don’t you think they could come up with some better ones? Eron/Elon and a four letter surname? Echos of Elon Musk. Wolf is a self proclaimed tech billionaire from Silicon Valley. FUTO is described on their website as follows:

About
FUTO is an organization dedicated to giving people back control over their technology. Through in-house engineering, investments, grants, and public education efforts, we build and fund software that challenges the dominance of Big Tech.

FUTO sprang out of nowhere, in 2021, in the height of the “covid” pantomime fake pandemic, offering grants / funding to freedom and privacy loving tech projects. What’s Not To Like™? However, upon reading into them today, my tin foil hat began to twitch with increasing intensity, because their messaging and timing are suspiciously correlated to that of our old friends, state actors PowerUp Privacy, which are well documented in this forum.

I’ve been digging into FUTO because something didn’t seem right about them. I first heard about Futo’s AI/LLM based voice keyboard for Android which I tried and can attest to it’s amazing accuracy. Even when I tried to fox it by putting on a ridiculously exaggerated impersonation of a thick Glaswegian accent that invariably and unintentionally ended up sounding like a weird mix of Indian, Irish, Welsh and Cornish, it still managed to perfectly transcribe most of my otherwise unintelligible babble. However, I uninstalled the FUTO voice keyboard due to its license which undermines the principles of Free Software.

I was lead to FUTO whilst researching one of the presenters at BCH Bliss 2026, Sally Mayweather, who on paper I initially thought was female, but turns out he’s a bloke (he/him/his 🤔). Mayweather, known as “Sal the Agorist”, champions a lot of great sounding ideas. Mayweather’s podcast is on the website The Free Thought Project where he is promoted as:

Sal Mayweather is a social media star, commentator, agorist, cypherpunk, and a Rothbardian crypto anarchist. He has a devout following and is also a book publisher as his new book “Anti Politics” hit bookstore shelves last July. He is a brilliant thought aggregator, well spoken and keeps his finger on the pulse of the latest and most important information on the internet.

All sounds great, until you see The Free Thought Project is partnered with minds.com as outlined on their website below:

We are also working with the folks from minds.com and have created a platform on their uncensored network as well. You can follow us at this link.

And guess who funded minds.com with a whopping $10M in July 2021? You guessed it, Eron Wolf at FUTO. Their stated goal was to “decentralize and fight big tech”. Noble indeed. Sounds familiar?

Could FUTO be another arm of the state, posing as a friend of freedom, but with intentions to subvert any project or initiative with ambitions to develop freedom enhancing technology? My initial research suggests that their goal is to undermine Free Software (commonly called Open Source Software, which itself is an attack on Free Software - but that’s another story - check here).

FUTO talks a good talk, and to the untrained eye, seems very cool and enticing. Lot’s of talk of “fighting Big Tech, decentralisation, taking back control of our computers etc”. But on closer inspection, it is set up to undermine the principles of free software, as defined by GNU. Their punchy messaging, along with very lucrative incentives are akin to a tempting freedom flavoured cocktail, laced with fake-liberty inducing drugs, designed to create the illusion of freedom whilst in reality tightening the grip of the state .

They tried to subvert GrapheneOS, but it didn’t end well for Futo. Check here

The GrapheneOS project is quoted as saying:

FUTO made a $40k donation to GrapheneOS supposedly with no strings attached. They ended up being unhappy with us not making content with them and promoting them. They began supporting attacks on us and tried to destroy the GrapheneOS project. Recommend not taking money from them.

They have also given donations to many other projects without any discussion, then went ahead to use those project names / logos to promote their own brand without permission. Check What’s Up With FUTO?. Note though that this article is critical of FUTO for allegedly supporting fascists, so it looks to be blinded by the Left/Right dichotomy.

I’m sure Mayweather’s intentions are genuine, but seeing such names just beneath the surface of The Free Thought Project gives me pause.

More to come. Looking for links now between PowerUp Privacy and FUTO. I have a strong suspicion they’re the same organisation, with deep ties to the state and with nefarious intentions.