An open blockchain for permissionless coordination
Built on Substrate. Programmed in WebAssembly. Governed on-chain by everyone who shows up.
Four pillars of Taler
Architecture
Modular pallets define every runtime domain — balances, staking, contracts, assets, identity, governance. New pallets ship through governance referenda, deployed in place.
Primitives
Assets, NFTs, identity, and governance live at the runtime level. No smart contract deployment required to issue, transfer, or compose them.
Evolution
The WebAssembly runtime upgrades through on-chain governance. Every node downloads the new logic and runs it automatically at the scheduled block.
Governance
Democracy referenda, an elected Council, a Technical Committee, and a community-funded Treasury share every protocol decision.
How Taler runs
Three layers that work in concert — consensus, contracts, and runtime-native primitives.
Hybrid consensus
BABE produces blocks every six seconds through a verifiable random function. GRANDPA finalizes them with Byzantine fault tolerance.
Smart contracts
Write contracts in Rust with ink!, or port Solidity through Solang. Deterministic Wasm bytecode with weight metering.
Native primitives
Assets, NFTs, and identity ship as runtime pallets — no smart contract deployment required.
Guarantees of the runtime
Four ways to engage
Explorer
A window into on-chain state — blocks, validators, and runtime activity in real time.
Inspect any extrinsic, follow validator set rotations, audit governance proposals — every byte of network history is verifiable.
Open ExplorerFAQ
Taler is an open blockchain built on the Substrate framework with a WebAssembly runtime. Hybrid consensus (BABE + GRANDPA) over Nominated Proof of Stake, on-chain governance through Democracy referenda, and smart contracts written in ink! or Solidity.
BABE assigns block authors through a verifiable random function in six-second slots. GRANDPA finalizes chains rather than individual blocks — a single round can finalize many blocks at once. The network tolerates fewer than a third of Byzantine validators.
Write ink! smart contracts in Rust, or port Solidity through Solang. Compose with native primitives — assets, NFTs, identity, recovery, governance — all available at the runtime level without deploying any contract.
Democracy referenda are decided by holders, weighted by conviction multipliers. The Council can cancel dangerous referenda; the Technical Committee can fast-track urgent ones; the Treasury, funded by 80% of transaction fees and 100% of uncancelled slashing penalties, supports ongoing development.
TAL is the native token of the Taler network — used for transaction fees, governance voting weight, validator commitments, and deposits across pallets like identity, recovery, and proxy. It connects every part of the Taler runtime.
An optional commitment mechanism: participants can lock bonded TAL for one to twelve months. The runtime records that commitment in the issuance schedule. Base issuance applied to bonded stake is 12%; Vivid Staking adds up to 6% for the twelve-month commitment — both values are runtime constants encoded in the protocol.
Build pallets and ink! contracts, run a validator node, audit security, write tutorials and docs, or propose protocol improvements through Democracy referenda. The codebase is open and governance is on-chain — the path from idea to enacted change runs in public.
The Taler Whitepaper is the canonical reference — runtime, consensus, staking, governance, contracts. It's the source of truth behind every page on this site. Open it directly from the Society page or follow the link in the Whitepaper section.