NLnet announces funding for 67 more open-source projects
Key takeaways
- 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.
- An NGI Pilot programme is executed by a consortium of hands-on partners that work on a practical solution in a specific domain.
- Dot Product Unit (DPU) is an open-source hardware IP block for efficient vector dot-product computation across multiple numeric formats.
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.
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.
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.