Safeguarding economically important agricultural species has developed into multi-billion-dollar global industries driven by storage, evaluation, and distribution of genetic resources as cryopreserved germplasm maintained in repositories. Aquaculture is following in these footsteps. As the tremendous potential in germplasm repositories is being realized by the broader aquaculture community, a window of opportunity has emerged to shape the future of genetic management and to avoid problems that emerged during the growth and development of modern agriculture. Communities are reevaluating how they move valuable genetic resources around the world. The lack of repository capabilities endangers advances across many industries including aquaculture, conservation programs, natural fisheries, biomedical models, and addressing food security and poverty alleviation. Restricting repository development to individual species or groups will result in disparate and incompatible processes, and therefore better outcomes will be achieved by working at the community and network levels. Open hardware will be critical in supporting this development as devices that are customizable and made available as digital files will accelerate community development, drive innovation, and ensure access to diverse communities. In addition, the generalization of open hardware across organisms and biological levels of organization can provide a foundation for developing repositories and a means for addressing cross-taxa challenges. This will allow leveraging of existing resources and information to bring much-needed scalability and application. In this workshop we will explore the culmination of almost a decade worth of open hardware development demonstrated in the form of an open-capability package (Figure 1). Such packages will combine open-hardware technologies and provide an initial foundation for community members to access cryopreservation in the laboratory or field. These diverse technologies provide a powerful alternative to traditional research and proprietary development by enabling combined efforts across multiple communities to establish and operate germplasm repositories and manage and eventually commercialize genetic resources of aquatic species.