Taler Scalability

BASIC INFORMATION

Short name: Taler Scalability
Long name: GNU Taler Scalability: Demonstrating the scalability of GNU Taler for the requirements of a Digital Euro

Company: Taler Systems SA
Country: Luxembourg

Call: F4Fp-SME-COD210601 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-SME-COD210601-01

SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS

GNU Taler is a Free Software electronic payment system developed by the GNU Project and Taler Systems SA. The payment system is based on Chaumian digital cash and uses a REST API and Postgres database at the heart of the system. A security audit of GNU Taler was previously funded by NGI ZERO, and the German Prototype Fund has funded the integration of GNU Taler with European banking APIs (LibEuFin).

The system has been presented to the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Central Bank of Tawian, the Swiss National Bank, and was universally found to be interesting and policy-relevant to the central bank staff we talked with. In our experiment, we want to demonstrat the scalability of the system, which already achieves over 1000 transactions per second on a desktop computer. For this, we want to run multiple HTTP(S) frontends, database backends (possibly with sharding) and in particular thousands of simulated clients to trigger payments over the network. The goal is to assure central banks that the system can scale to the transaction rates required for the Digital Euro. For further information as to why Taler is interesting for central banks, please see https://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/papers/id/working_paper_2021_03.

MATERIALS