Meet the Projects Receiving NGI Taler grants

We'd like to congratulate the five teams who have been selected for NGI Taler grants in the program's first open call. Taler (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources) is a new secure electronic payment system based on open standards, free software, and advanced cryptography. The five selected projects will make specific contributions to Taler:

• GNU Taler Wallet ID Lookup Service will provide the optional discovery of wallet addresses linked to digital identities
• Road Signs for Digital Payments will work on an interface for people who can not read or write
• TALER Bullion will add an infrastructure for Taler payments with non-fiat currencies such as gold and silver
• MTE - the MirageOS Taler Exchange will implement Taler Exchange functionality in OCaml-based unikernel
• Taler-Odoo Payment System will integrate Taler in the Odoo business management software suite

A consortium of 11 partners from 8 European countries is working on NGI Taler. Taler provides privacy guarantees to the buyer while offering the possibility to audit merchants, making sale incomes transparent and fraud difficult. Part of the budget is reserved for third party funding, enabling teams to make additional enhancements to Taler. We'd like to introduce you to the five projects who've been selected in the first open call.

Meet the projects!

GNU Taler Wallet ID Lookup Service

Optional discovery of TALER wallet addresses linked to digital identities

GNU Taler is a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy. This project will facilitate the support of peer-to-peer payments (P2P) for the GNU Taler payment system between users by implementing a privacy- friendly directory service and lightweight inbox service (TALer DIRectory). The services will allow users to securely associate their online identities (such as email addresses, phone numbers, X/Twitter/Mastodon handles or other suitable verifiable addresses and accounts) with their wallet public keys and the URL of an inbox service and use it for P2P payments. Storage and retrieval may also be offloaded to distributed directory services such as DNS or GNS (RFC 9498) instead of a database and web service while maintaining the respective privacy guarantees.

Road Signs for Digital Payments

Safe, usable financial interfaces for poorly-schooled adults.

GNU Taler is a digital payment protocol for privacy-preserving cash-like transactions. It improves usability by avoiding the need for the payer to authenticate to third parties. OIM is a free, open source emerging approach of design for creating safe, usable financial interfaces for poorly-schooled adults.

Worldwide UNESCO estimates over 750 million adults to be unable to read or write in any language, and hundreds of millions of more have extremely limited ability. Due to unequal schooling opportunities, most are women. In Europe millions of migrants, refugees and marginalized people cannot confidently use digital payments.

Digital OIM features carefully user-tested cash scrollbars and counting tables, iconographic navigation, mnemonic cues, user-reversible transaction processes, a 0-9 (not 1-0) numeric keypad and more. Poorly-schooled app users learn how to decode place value notation, arithmetic graphs and other schooled, formal sector protocols from repetitive use.

TALER Bullion

Infrastructure for GNU Taler Payments with non-fiat Currencies

Depending on how you design a money system, its properties can be quite different. Government-issued currencies are typically inflated, to create a good influx of money that benefits investors and yields economic growth. The downside is that prices rise, and that savings deprecate over time. If money were up to people, they would probably prefer a system with more predictable purchasing power, such as gold and silver.

GNU Taler is a well-designed system for (online) payments, and it is eminently suitable to trade (the ownership safely of) stored gold, silver and similar systems based on real value. Besides its obvious use case as a payment system for regular currencies, the system can also be used to revitalise gold and silver for storage and payment systems; they still exist today but are decoupled. The purpose of this project is to solve problems with trust relations, such as passing (the ownership of) gold or silver between vault operators, or between gold storage and payment systems so it can become practically useful money on an international scale, in service of people outside the financial industry.

MTE - the MirageOS Taler Exchange

Implement Taler Exchange functionality in OCaml-based unikernel

This project will develop a drop-in implementation for a GNU Taler exchange with the unikernel framework MirageOS. The GNU Taler Exchange is a service that needs to be robust and high secure (plus allow very high security deployments). MirageOS uses OCaml, a functional programming language with a static type system which catches lots of errors at compile time, and provides memory-safety. With MirageOS, one only embeds the code that is really required to run the service in the virtual machine image - resulting in a relatively much smaller attack surface.

The resulting solution will use very little resources (memory usage / CPU cycles), which is beneficial both from a green computing perspective, and from a performance perspective. The plan is to use existing tests of GNU Taler exchange, in addition to our own fuzz testing, to ensure that MTE acts the same as GNU Taler exchange.

Taler-Odoo Payment System

Integration module for TALER in Odoo

The Taler-Odoo Payment System (TOPS) will integrate the GNU Taler payment system within Odoo, a business management software suite that includes customer relationship management, e-commerce, billing, accounting, manufacturing, warehouse, project management, and inventory management. With Odoo, merchants can create invoices for products they sell, websites to display them and much mor

This project will produce an Odoo module written in Javascript and Python, which allows users to pay with Taler. Similar to any other payment integration within the Odoo Framework, the module integrates into the functionality of other existing Odoo modules (ticket sale, online shopping, invoices, etc). It will allows merchants to offer a customer to choose a payment system that fully respects their privacy.

Apply for funding

If you would like to contribute to the Taler project, the third open call is currently running with deadline October 1, 2024. If you prefer to work in another domain on free and open source projects, check out our other open calls. We currently have five programs you can apply for.

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