NLnet; 67 Open Technology Projects awarded NGI grants
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Send in your ideas for NGI Taler/Fediversity. Deadline August 1, 2026
67 Open Technology Projects awarded NGI grants
We are happy to announce that 67 new projects have been awarded grants today as part of the Next Generation Internet intiative, across three different funds: NGI Zero Commons Fund, NGI TALER and NGI Fediversity. We congratulate the developers and engineers involved with these projects, and thank them for their forthcoming contribution to an open, resilient and human-centered internet. The selection covers the entire technology stack from trustworthy open hardware, to services & applications providing user autonomy. Go and meet the NGI0 projects right away, or read on about the programmes.
Privacy-preserving payments and a hosting stack
An NGI Pilot programme is executed by a consortium of hands-on partners that work on a practical solution in a specific domain. NGI Taler is building an electronic payment system that offers privacy for those that make payments, while enforcing transparency on those that sell. NGI Fediversity is a comprehensive effort to bring easy-to-use, hosted internet services with service portability and personal freedom at their core to everyone. Each pilot has dedicated part of its budget for supporting outside projects that contribute to these goals. In the December 2025 and February 2026 open calls, six projects have been selected to contribute to the two pilots: Fleetbase × Taler is making low-cost, privacy friendly payments for logistics software, Taler PoS addresses Point-of-Sale software, and two other projects are delivering integration of GNU Taler in the functional package management system GNU Guix and automated UI testing and type generation for Taler's iOS app. The two projects granted within NGI Fediversity are the file-hosting platform Nocloud and Magic Nix VFS — which allows for the transparent distribution of software on-demand from cache servers to client machines, effectively creating a gigantic "virtual Nix store" available on demand.
From flow batteries to causal AI<br>The projects granted within NGI Zero Commons Fund range from an open hardware Hybrid Flow Battery to standards-compliant distributed OpenPGP key server, virtualised microservices in the Rust-based operating system Redox and an ambitious DHT project, a verification and compliance tool for the EUDI Wallet system (Ruuti) and an ActivityPub testing tool (DrFed). There are various efforts around independent browsers and browser engines, e.g. improving writing modes and multimedia support in Servo, as well as a new effort called Bisque (actually built on top of Servo) that aims to improve desktop integration of the browser.There are tools for chips/FPGA design such as CflexHDL, a porting effort for Apicula for the Gowin GW5A platform, and a libre-licensed CPU that will support a programmable decoder to be able to support multiple instruction sets in a single chip. Dot Product Unit (DPU) is an open-source hardware IP block for efficient vector dot-product computation across multiple numeric formats. At the level of Printed Circuit Boards there is a new effort adding various new format importers to Ringdove EDA. There is also concrete hardware, such as the innovative open hardware encryption device Einszeit and the reverse engineering platfrom Unbinare RET, and the open hardware phone mikroPhone.
Scientists and engineers will be happy to see accessibility improvements to the LaTeX ecosystem, a framework for Zotero plugins, tools for Selective Data Disclosure, the cross-platform GPU multi-physics simulation engine Nexus, the tool QUATT which helps to design and understand solid-state quantum circuits, procedural and mathematical visualizations, and integrationg of the volume computation and high dimensions sampling solution Ovolesti in GNU Octave. Open Instrument Control will implement a variety of open-source transport-level protocols for communicating with test and measurement (T&M) instruments. And pgmpy is software for causal AI, the branch of machine learning concerned with cause-and-effect relationships rather than prediction alone. AppBundler makes distribution of Julia software easier.
There is continued innovation at the network and protocol level with MultiPath TCP and microTCP, enhancements to the Routing Policy Specification Language and (on a completely different layer of the network) a solution to help with the rollout of actual physical (optical) Fiber infrastructure. DMRSEC will look into the security of Digital Mobile Radio, an important standard used by emergency services and critical infrastructure globally.
OS innovation and evolution takes place through adding kernel observability to Landlock, the new sandboxing solution Island, improving xdgmime. There are several wayland related projects, such as the non-monolithic Wayland compositor River that has a new window management protocol to separate...