AFAICT they're both multi-protocol (or even protocol-agnostic) onion routers. Tor on the other hand can only transport TCP.
And while Lokinet has a stronger focus on exit nodes, I doubt there's no way to host exit nodes on Veilid either.

So from what I can tell they look to be very very similiar. Maybe they differentiate on which cryptographic primitives they use, but otherwise the same concept (except for the node hosting incentive approach).

Maybe I'm entirely mistaken though. It's hard to find technical data about Veilid.

Edit: From their pre-release docs: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid/-/blob/main/docs/guide/guide.md?ref_type=heads#user-privacy

User Privacy

In order to ensure that users can participate in Veilid with some amount of privacy, we need to address the fact that being connected to Veilid entails communicating with other peers, and therefore sharing IP addresses. A user's peer will therefore be frequently issuing RPCs in a way that directly associates the user's identifying information with their peer's ID. Veilid provides privacy by allowing the use of an RPC forwarding mechanism that uses cryptography to similar to onion routing in order to hide the path that a message takes between its actual originating peer and its actual destination peer, by hopping between additional intermediate peers.

The specific approach that Veilid takes to privacy is two sided: privacy of the sender of a message, and privacy of the receiver of a message. Either or both sides can want privacy or opt out of privacy. To achieve sender privacy, Veilid use something called a Safety Route: a sequence of any number of peers, chosen by the sender, who will forward messages. The sequence of addresses is put into a nesting doll of encryption, so that each hop can see the previous and next hops, while no hop can see the whole route. This is similar to a Tor route, except only the addresses are encrypted for each hop. The route can be chosen at random for each message being sent.

Receiver privacy is similar, in that we have a nesting doll of encrypted peer addresses, except because it's for incoming messages, the various addresses have to be shared ahead of time. We call such things Private Routes, and they are published to the key-value store as part of a user's public data. For full privacy on both ends, a Private Route will be used as the final destination of a Safety Route, and the total route is the composition of the two, so that neither the sender nor receiver knows the IP address of the other.