exit relay

an exit relay is the last stop of a tor circuit - the hop that talks to the normal internet, sees the destination, and takes the most legal heat in the network.

for traffic headed to normal websites, the exit relay is where your circuit touches the clear web. it unwraps the final layer of encryption and makes the actual request to the destination, which is why websites see the exit's ip address and not yours.

because the exit unwraps that last layer, it can see the destination and - if the connection is plain http - the content too. anything protected with tls or routed to an onion service is unreadable to the exit operator. this asymmetry is the whole reason https everywhere matters on tor.

exits carry the network's legal weight: complaints about abuse land on the exit operator, since that is the visible ip. running one demands a dedicated server, a published exit policy, and tolerance for abuse reports, which is why exits are the scarcest kind of relay and the network always wants more of them.

common myth worth killing: a site logging your exit ip has learned almost nothing about you. thousands of users share that exit at any moment, and your next ten minutes of browsing probably leaves through a different one entirely.