NLnet awards grants to 67 open-source projects across three funds

NLnet has announced funding for 67 new open-source projects as part of the Next Generation Internet initiative, spanning three separate funds. The projects cover the entire technology stack, from trustworthy open hardware through to services and applications designed to provide user autonomy.

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NLnet has announced that 67 new projects have been awarded grants as part of the Next Generation Internet initiative. The funding is distributed across three programmes: NGI Zero Commons Fund, NGI TALER, and NGI Fediversity. The selection spans the full technology stack, from open hardware design to user-facing applications built around personal freedom and autonomy.

The announcement recognises developers and engineers contributing to what NLnet describes as an open, resilient, and human-centred internet. Projects were selected through open calls held in December 2025 and February 2026, with six projects chosen specifically to contribute to the NGI TALER and NGI Fediversity pilot programmes.

How the Programmes Work

NGI TALER is focused on building an electronic payment system that offers privacy for those making payments whilst enforcing transparency on those selling. Several projects are contributing to this effort, including Fleetbase × Taler, which targets low-cost, privacy-friendly payments for logistics software, and Taler PoS, which addresses point-of-sale software. Two further projects are delivering integration of GNU Taler into the GNU Guix functional package management system, as well as automated UI testing and type generation for Taler's iOS app.

NGI Fediversity aims to bring easy-to-use, hosted internet services with service portability and personal freedom at their core. The two projects funded within this pilot are Nocloud, a file-hosting platform, and Magic Nix VFS, which enables transparent distribution of software on demand from cache servers to client machines, effectively creating a large virtual Nix store available on demand.

Technical Scope and Featured Projects

The funded projects span a wide range of technical domains. In hardware and chip design, there are tools such as CflexHDL for FPGA design, a porting effort for Apicula targeting the Gowin GW5A platform, and a libre-licensed CPU designed to support a programmable decoder capable of handling multiple instruction sets in a single chip. The Dot Product Unit is an open-source hardware IP block for efficient vector dot-product computation across multiple numeric formats, and Ringdove EDA is receiving new format importers at the printed circuit board level.

Concrete hardware projects include the open hardware encryption device Einszeit, the reverse engineering platform Unbinare RET, and the open hardware phone mikroPhone. Scientists and engineers are also served by a range of software tools, including 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, and QUATT, which helps design and understand solid-state quantum circuits. Integration of the volume computation and high-dimensional sampling solution Ovolesti into GNU Octave is also among the funded work.

Availability and Further Information

Details of all newly funded projects are available directly through NLnet's NGI0 project listings. Each pilot programme has dedicated a portion of its budget to supporting outside projects that contribute to its specific goals, allowing a broad range of contributors to participate in the initiative.

Story based on discussion on Hacker News.