News

2025-11: GNU Taler v1.2 released

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v1.2.

This release focuses on a completely new component, the GNU Taler Donation Authority, or short the Donau. With it, tax authorities can give recognized charities the ability to issue donation receipts to donors. At the end of the year, donors can combine their donation receipts into a single donation statement and submit that with their taxes to receive a deduction. Following GNU Taler's design principles, which charities the donor donated to would remain private, while the income to each charity would be transparent.
We are interested in contacts at tax authorities and charities to roll out this system.

About GNU Taler

GNU Taler is a Free Software payment system that preserves the privacy of payers while ensuring that income is visible to authorities. Regulated payment service providers use the Taler protocol to issue digital cash denominated in a fiat currency. The digital cash tokens are stored in electronic wallets under the full control of its respective owner. The payment service provider has an escrow bank account holding the equivalent of all digital cash in circulation.

Merchants redeeming digital cash receive aggregate transactions over the respective amount into their regular bank account. Digital cash transactions happen basically instantly, and must be performed online to prevent double-spending.

Support exists for offline points-of-sales to accept transactions where only the customer is online. GNU Taler is scalable and technologically suitable for regional currencies (such as eNetzbon), commercial deployments (such as Taler Operations AG) or central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Changes in GNU Taler v1.2

For GNU Taler v1.2 we addressed over 25 individual issues. Our bug tracker has the list. Notable changes include:

  • NEW: Support for Valiant bank in libeufin
  • NEW: First release of Donau component
  • NEW: Support for Donau in the merchant backend (but not the SPA)
  • NEW: Support for Donau in the Android wallet
  • Various minor bugfixes, user experience and documentation improvements

Our work is co-funded by the European Commission and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) as part of the NGI TALER project. Integration for Valiant bank was supported by NGI Local for Local under grant agreement 101135443.

Download links

The wallets have their own download site here. The exchange, merchant backend, sync and bank components are distributed via the GNU FTP mirrors.

You must first install GNUnet v0.25.3 or the current Git master to compile GNU Taler 1.2 from source.