Three Projects Funded to Contribute to the TALER Payment System

We are happy to share that three teams have been selected for grants in the NGI TALER programme. Their projects will contribute to TALER, the secure electronic payment system based on open standards, free software, and advanced cryptography. The three selected projects are: Libre Payments in Ruby, Taler in Liberapay and Taler OpenAPI specification. These projects will make it easier to make applications TALER-capable in different programming languages, and will also actively deploy Taler in two concrete international initiatives: the Open Food Network and Liberapay.

TALER (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources) is a frictionless, sustainable, low-cost and highly scalable payment system. It provides privacy guarantees to the buyer while offering the possibility to audit merchants, making sale incomes transparent and fraud difficult. The NGI TALER programme is a consortium of 11 partners from 8 European countries working on the development of TALER. It is part of the Next Generation Internet initiative of the European Commission. Part of the programme's budget is reserved for third party funding, enabling teams to make additional enhancements to TALER.

If you applied for a grant
This is the selection for the April and June calls of the NGI TALER pilot programme only. We always inform all applicants about the outcome of the review ahead of the public announcement, whether they are selected or not. If you have not heard anything, you probably applied to a later call or a different fund that is still under review.

How do I find out which call round I applied to?

You can see which call round you applied to by checking the application number assigned to the project when you submitted the proposal. The number starts with the year and month of the call, so 2025-04- in the case of the April 2025 call. You see that same number featured in the emails we send you (It should not happen, but if you did apply to another call and did not hear anything, do contact us)

Meet the projects!

Libre Payments in Ruby

GNU Taler Integration for ethical trade

The project aims at developing and publishing an open-source Ruby gem for integrating GNU Taler into Ruby-based e-commerce applications — starting with Open Food Network (OFN). OFN is a global, nonprofit platform that supports food co-ops, local producers, and community food hubs with open-source tools for ethical trade.

Currently, OFN supports Stripe and PayPal. Adding Taler introduces a low-fee, non-extractive payment option aligned with user values. The gem will be released on rubygems.org and designed for reuse in other Ruby apps such as Spree and Solidus. The project includes testing with pilot users, full documentation, and developer engagement

Taler in Liberapay

Implementation of Taler as payment provider in Liberapay

Liberapay is a recurrent donations platform, that allows users to financially support people who contribute to the commons. Building free software, spreading free knowledge, these things take time and cost money, not only to do the initial work, but also to maintain over time. Liberapay's recurrent donations system is intended to provide crowdfunded income to creators and maintainers, enabling them to keep doing great work that benefits everyone. This project will add GNU Taler as a payment provider in Liberapay. This will enable users with a Taler wallet to support projects and people in a privacy preserving manner.

Taler OpenAPI specification

JSON/YAML OpenAPI for key GNU Taler API's

The OpenAPI specification is an industry standard that simplifies application integration through code generation tools and basic test support. It is highly appreciated by developers who are confronted with the task of establishing a connection to new APIs.

This project adds automatic OpenAPI specification generation to GNU Taler's bank APIs and the wallet-core API. These additions should prove beneficial for the introduction of GNU Taler, in banks and elsewhere.

Apply for funding

If you would like to contribute to the TALER project yourself, the ninth open call is currently running with deadline October 1^st, 2025. If you prefer to work in another domain on free and open source projects, check out our other open calls. We currently have multiple programmes you can apply for.

Acknowledgements