DNS4EU

DNS4EU is a free public resolver built under a Digital Europe Programme grant by a consortium that Whalebone coordinated with the Czech registry CZ.NIC, the Czech Technical University and Poland’s NASK, among others. The grant ran from 2023 to 2025; since 2026 Whalebone owns and operates the service alone and says it stays free for individuals in Europe. Its threat intelligence draws on national CERT and CSIRT reporting, which is the part no global resolver replicates.

Where Cloudflare splits its resolver across three addresses, DNS4EU publishes five: unfiltered, protective, protective plus child protection, protective plus ad blocking, and all of them together. Each validates DNSSEC and is reachable over DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS. Resolution happens on fourteen recursive resolvers in fourteen member states and the backend sits in the EU, with client IP addresses hashed at the resolver using a key that rotates daily. The service reported four billion queries and an average latency of about thirteen milliseconds in the first quarter of 2026.

Three trade-offs are worth knowing before switching. Fourteen points of presence is a fraction of Cloudflare’s network, so a reader outside the covered states may notice. Anonymised query records are kept for up to six months, where Cloudflare states twenty-five hours. And the terms offer the service as-is with no uptime commitment, while court-ordered domain blocks apply to every profile, including the unfiltered one. The service is also for individuals only — the terms exclude enterprises and connectivity providers, who are sold a separate product.

Whalebone, s.r.o. is a Czech network-security company registered in Brno at Jezuitská 14/13, IČO 05120403, incorporated in May 2016 and recorded in the commercial register of the Regional Court in Brno under file C 93547. Its commercial business is DNS-layer security sold to telecommunications operators and enterprises under the Aura, Immunity and Peacemaker names; it says more than 300 telecommunications providers use its services.

The company’s shareholder register is Czech-majority and granular: the founder Robert Šefr and the Czech holding company The Sky is the Limit each hold about 22 percent, with the remainder spread across Czech employee and investor vehicles and two German and Hungarian venture funds, DayOne CEE and Telefónica’s Wayra Deutschland. Two vehicles outside the EU — Unbound Fund LP in Abu Dhabi and Unbound Holdco in Jersey — together hold under ten percent, a minority with no control and no parent company above the Czech entity.

Whalebone coordinated the DNS4EU consortium, which built a European public DNS resolver with the Czech registry CZ.NIC, the Czech Technical University, Poland’s NASK and others under a Digital Europe Programme grant that ran from 2023 to 2025. Since 2026 the company owns and operates the service alone and states that the public resolver stays free for individuals in Europe.