When making a payment, customers only need a loaded wallet. A merchant can accept payments <span class="tlr">without making their customers register</span> on the merchant's Website.
Once the wallet is loaded, payments on websites take only one click, are never falsely rejected by fraud detection and do not pose any risk of phishing or identity theft.
Taler does not introduce a new currency. Taler uses a digital wallet storing coins and payment service providers with settlement accounts in existing currencies. Thus, Taler's cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even Bitcoins.
This project is about adding KYC and AML support to GNU Taler by integrating rules for conditions that require users to authenticate or exchange operators to review records for AML. We will be integrating support for KYC via the open OAuth2.0 standard as well as a few (sadly) proprietary APIs to enable compliance. We will also be implementing a (simple) address verification service using the OAuth 2.0 API.
This project is about implementing a GNU Taler wallet for the iOS platform. The wallet is to support all of the features of the existing Android and WebExtension wallets.
This project is about improving the usability of GNU Taler for regional currencies. It improves account management in libeufin to turn it into a comprehensive stand-alone bank service. We are also adding currency conversion to enable users to convert from and to the regional currency. Furthermore, some time was spent on requirements analysis, revealing the need for merchants without digital infrastructure to receive payments, resulting in us implementing templating support that enables payments to merchants that are fully offline.
We received funding under NGI POINTER to add P2P payments and make GNU Taler more programmable. P2P payments allow wallets to request payments (invoicing) and to offer digital cash directly to other wallets. We also implemented age-restricted payments that allow merchants to validate the age of buyers without disclosing additional information. Finally, we created an early prototype for auctions (but without full integration across all GNU Taler components).
This project improved the security of the GNU Taler exchange via an external code audit, and created a competent external security auditor to help with safely operating the Taler payment system.
As a payment service provider, the Taler exchange is subject to financial regulation. Financial regulation and regular audits are critical to establish trust. In particular, the Taler design mandates the existence of an independent auditor who checks cryptographic proofs that accumulate at the exchange to ensure that the escrow account (or internal settlement account) is managed honestly. This ensures that the exchange does not threaten the economy due to fraud.
GNU Taler must be <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free/Libre Software</a>. For merchants, Free/Libre Software prevents vendor lock-in meaning merchants can easily choose another service provider to process their payments. For countries, Free/Libre software means GNU Taler can not compromise sovereignty by imposing restrictions or requirements. And for exchange operators, transparency is crucial to satisfy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle">Kerckhoffs's principle</a> and to establish public confidence.
GNU Taler must be designed to be efficient. Quite simply, efficiency means fewer things to break, and it means more transactions per second and lower environmental impact. Efficiency is also critical for GNU Taler to be used for micropayments. Therefore certain expensive primitives, such as proof-of-work, must not be used by GNU Taler.
Install the wallet for your browser below, then check out the <a href="https://demo.taler.net">demonstration</a>. The source code is provided <a href="https://taler.net/files/wallet/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.