NGI TALER Fund
This page contains a concise overview of projects funded by NLnet foundation that belong to NGI TALER Fund (see the thematic index). There is more information available on each of the projects listed on this page - all you need to do is click on the title or the link at the bottom of the section on each project to read more. If a description on this page is a bit technical and terse, don't despair — the dedicated page will have a more user-friendly description that should be intelligible for 'normal' people as well. If you cannot find a specific project you are looking for, please check the alphabetic index or just search for it (or search for a specific keyword).
In the digital economy, payments play a critical role. Yet online payment systems tend to allow for far less privacy than paying with a bank note or coins, especially when using proprietary solutions like Google Pay or Apple Pay. When interacting with the offline economy comes into play, the alternative of paying with all kind of volatile cryptocurrencies isn't a viable option either.
NGI TALER is a project funded by the European Commission and the Swiss State to roll out a new electronic payment system that benefits everyone: people, merchants, banks, financial authorities, auditors and anti-corruption researchers. The project doesn't have to start from scratch either, but builds on the strong foundations of GNU Taler — the privacy-preserving digital payment system developed by the GNU community and Taler Systems SA. This offers privacy for those that make payments, while enforcing transparency on those that sell. By providing micro payments at very low overhead, GNU Taler permits internet business models to shift away from advertising revenue or subscription models, especially for online publishers. No-risk transactions can lower transaction fees and open online payments for the underbanked population and citizens marginalized from digitalisation.
NGI TALER is part of the Next Generation Internet initiative, which focuses on the development and maintenance of internet commons that support the vision of a resilient, trustworthy and sustainably open technology stack that empowers users, and grants everyone full autonomy.
All project results become available under a free and open source license so you will be able to study, use, modify and share everything with anyone you want! And even better: part of NGI TALER is a supporting grant programme through NLnet, through which auxiliary efforts can be funded. This means that if you are interested in actively contributing to this effort, you can still join! Do you have a project idea that complements, strenghtens or otherwise will benefit GNU TALER? Why not put in a proposal yourself, calls are currently open!
Applications are still open, you can apply today.
- MTE - the MirageOS Taler Exchange — Implement Taler Exchange functionality in OCaml-based unikernel
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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.
>> Read more about MTE - the MirageOS Taler Exchange
- TALER Bullion — Infrastructure for GNU Taler Payments with non-fiat Currencies
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Depending on how you design a money system, its properties can be quite different. Regular currencies are typically steered towards (slight) inflation by the public bodies that steward them, by means of a gradual influx of money. This benefits "active money" (investors) which yields economic growth. Of course this also makes prices for consumers continually rise, and savings de-valuate over time in terms of purchasing power. The rate at which this devaluation takes place is a policy instrument, and of course one that should be used wisely. When these systems were first designed, money was backed up by physical assets such as gold and silver which offered more predictable long term purchasing power. Some users still prefer for their savings to be backed up by something of concrete value they own.
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.
>> Read more about TALER Bullion
- Interledger interoperability inquiry — Investigate synergy between Interledger and GNU Taler
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The Interledger Protocol and Open Payments API specification are the payment protocols used for an online tipping specification being proposed in the W3C Web Platform Incubator Community Group called Web Monetization. The Web Monetization specification allows for automatic streaming micropayments and low-friction on-demand tipping to online creators who specify an Open Payments wallet address in their HTML or respective metadata of the online experience (e.g. JSON-LD in Activity Streams/ActivityPub, XML attribute in podcast RSS).
This project proposal will investigate the technical feasibility of using Taler as a payment method on the Interledger payment network to support Web Monetization. The outcome will be a an overview of potential approaches for integrating Taler using the Interledger Protocol or as a payment method in Interledger’s Open Payments API reference implementation (Rafiki).
>> Read more about Interledger interoperability inquiry
- GNU Taler Wallet ID Lookup Service — Optional discovery of TALER wallet addresses linked to digital identities
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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.
>> Read more about GNU Taler Wallet ID Lookup Service
- Road Signs for Digital Payments — Safe, usable financial interfaces for poorly-schooled adults.
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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.
>> Read more about Road Signs for Digital Payments
- Taler-Odoo Payment System (TOPS) — Integration module for TALER in Odoo
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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 more.
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.
>> Read more about Taler-Odoo Payment System (TOPS)
- GNU Taler Tryton/GNUHealth integration — GNU Taler module for Tryton ERP/GNU Health
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This project will develop a Tryton module which would allow users to integrate payments with GNU Taler into their financial workflow, whether from a webshop, a factory or a hospital. Tryton is a popular libre business management system used for e-commerce and enterprise resource planning. There are many modules for financial accounting, sales, inventory and stock, CRM, shipping, subscription management, etc. Existing payment provider integrations within Tryton are limited to specific proprietary payment providers, having a Taler based option would allow organisations to handle Taler based payments (incoming as well as outgoing).
GNU Health (which is built on Tryton) provides a suite of libre alternatives for Hospital Management software, health information systems and electronic health records. Integration of privacy preserving payments with TALER in GNU Health will deliver a much needed contribution to medical privacy, providing the first digital alternative (next to cash payment) which allows patients to pay for their personal medical treatment and medication directly and with full discretion - keeping the doctor-patient privilege intact.
>> Read more about GNU Taler Tryton/GNUHealth integration
