NLnet; 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 AIThe 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 concerns, another effort adding support for electrophoretic/e-reader displays in Wayland as well as adding Wayland support to the Disthro (audio) plugin framework. Software developers concerned about software supply chain security will love SecObservePlus and SBOMVert. There is fundamental work on providing secure alternatives for critical environments such as a from-scratch implementation of the Erlang VM (AtomVM). Funk is a compiler for hard real-time, functionally safe systems. There is also a compiler from Scheme to JavaScript, Assembly (x86), C, Python, Prolog and twenty other languages (Ribbit), and a project improving support for generalized algebraic data types in Haskell which should help prevent a whole class of security issues in software written in Haskell. In the area of mapping, there are various efforts such as projects to improve iD-tagging and iD-presets in OpenStreetMap, and the FOSS mobile mapping tool CoMaps. There are also projects around other large data commons, such as Open Food Facts. Amond the grantees are valuable end user applications as well, such as adding Collabora Online's Follow-me-slideshow to videoconferencing tool Jitsi, the podcast hosting tool Castopod, the communication client Posca, and ERP tool Dolibarr — with the latter gaining support for modern European e-invoicing standards. By improving the widely used SCIM python framework, a variety of integrations of this privacy friendly log-in mechanism will be unlocked. Karrot is social software for group coordination and community-building. And by adding Tor to SelfPrivacy, several new scenario's for self-hosting are unlocked. Video as one of the largest consumers of internet capacity is not forgotten: next to the video streaming platforms MistServer and PeerTube, there is FOSDEM's hardware video streaming solution Fazantix. Toward a digital commons The NGI Zero Commons Fund provides grants to people who help build the digital commons. Because all projects are free and open source technologies, all outcomes can be freely used, studied, shared and moderated by anyone. Together they provide the building blocks for a information and communication infrastructure that promotes digital autonomy and serves the common good.

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organisations led by NLnet that provides practical and financial support to projects fix the internet. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission. If you applied for a grant This is the selection for the December calls of 2025 of the NGI Zero Commons Fund fund, and the December 2025 and February 2026 calls of NGI TALER and NGI Fediversity. 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 — or you might have an overly active spam filter. 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 2025-12- in the case of the December 2025 call. You see that same number featured in the emails we send you (It should not happen, but if you did apply to this call and did not hear anything, do contact us) Meet the new projects! (you can click or tap on the project name to fold out additional information) Trustworthy hardware and manufacturing Apicula GW5A 60k & 138k — Open source toolchain for Gowin FPGAs Apicula is developing an open source toolchain for Gowin FPGAs. Open source tools avoid vendor lock-in and provide unique capabilities, but to avoid vendor lock-in you actually need to support multiple vendors. Apicula offers that, being the second most mature toolchain after Lattice thanks to previous grants. This grant furthers our support for their GW5A line of FPGAs, their most complex product line yet by a large margin.

▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Apicula-GW5A CflexHDL — C-based flexible hardware/software systems design Dot Product Unit - DPU — Hardware accelerator for computing vector dot products The Dot Product Unit (DPU) is an open-source hardware IP block for efficient vector dot-product computation across multiple numeric formats, including INT8, FP8, BF16, FP16, FP32 and FP64. It serves as a reusable arithmetic component for matrix-multiplication engines and related compute blocks used in AI acceleration, scientific computing, graphics, DSP and processor architectures. The design uses a pipelined SIMD datapath to process packed vector operands in parallel and reduce the products to a scalar result. It focuses on low latency, efficient hardware reuse across supported formats, and precise numerical behavior, including defined handling of rounding modes, overflow, underflow, NaNs and infinities. The project delivers synthesizable RTL, documentation, integration examples and an open verification environment with golden models, modular scoreboards, directed and random tests, functional coverage and CI support. The goal of the project is to give the open-hardware community a reusable and well-documented dot-product IP for CPUs, GPUs, vector units, DSP blocks, tensor accelerators and custom FPGA or ASIC systems. ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/DPU Einszeit Quantum-Proof Encryption — Quantum-proof hardware security platform Einszeit is an open-source hardware security platform that uses One-Time Pad cryptography with hardware-generated true random keys to theoretically provide perfectly secure, quantum-proof encryption between two paired devices over any communications medium. This project aims to improve the hardware, firmware, software, and documentation, as well as to engage with developers and users in order to make perfectly secure communications user-friendly and widely available. ▸ For more details see: https://nlnet.nl/project/Einszeit Fazantix video streaming box — All-in-one Open Hardware capture and streaming box Live-streaming a conference is deceptively hard: coordinating cameras, laptops, audio, and encoding across multiple (sometimes even dozens!) of rooms requires reliable, purpose-built gear that most events cannot afford or build themselves. This project aims to deliver a compact, all-in-one capture and streaming box using open hardware and running free software with mainline Linux kernel support.