TACEO

The team is in Cannes this week for EthCC, let's talk!

Onchain finance doesn't just need private transactions. It needs private accounts. Stablecoins are becoming real financial infrastructure. Circle, Stripe, Plasma, dedicated payment chains are launching, volumes are at all-time highs, and major institutions are making strategic bets. But there's a gap. Every financial system relies on something onchain payments still don't have: private accounts. Balances and transactions known only to the involved parties, auditable by authorized institutions when required. Hiding transaction amounts isn't enough. The transaction graph itself is sensitive. Who transacts with whom reveals business relationships, salary structures, vendor dependencies, competitive intelligence. For serious financial systems, the graph matters as much as the numbers. Today we're presenting Merces II, implementing a private account system for stablecoins on public blockchains. Move funds to your private account and your balance is encrypted. Transfer between users with all parties and amounts hidden. Withdraw with no link back to any private transfer. Two privacy modes (confidential or fully private), selectable per transaction. No custom chain required, no protocol-level modifications, it works wherever the EVM does. Privacy by default. Compliance built in through selective disclosure, authorized auditors can view exactly the transactions they need, nothing more. If you're building payment infrastructure, wallets, or financial systems on stablecoins, this is the execution layer for private finance.

We're in NYC this week for Blockworks's Digital Asset Summit, let's meet!

Three years ago, I couldn't have imagined we'd be launching our own network. That photo is from our first office. One room, end of 2022. We were a small team, whiteboarding what private execution infrastructure could look like. Coming from European research projects, I believed cryptographic guarantees could power real systems. But belief and production are very different things. 𝗧𝘄𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗳 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗼, 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝘁. A major client dropped, runway was three months, and we had one shot. We decided to go narrow: ZK and identity. In hindsight it's obvious. That space understood the value of what we were building. We spoke the same language. At the time it was terrifying. 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗜𝗗. 𝟭𝟳 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀. Cryptographic infrastructure we built, running in production at global scale. Today we're publicly launching the TACEO Network and I feel two things simultaneously: **proud and terrified.** Not the same terrified as before. Research papers and dev tooling are not the same as running infrastructure at scale. Getting here required growing as an organization as much as it did advancing the technology. That's real responsibility. 🔒 Privacy is not a feature. It's the condition for self-sovereignty in a digital economy. Without it, we don't own our digital lives. If you're building in identity, payments, or AI agents and are still relying on a centralized operator to handle the sensitive parts — the missing layer is now available. Let's talk. To the TACEO team: you know what you gave to get here. And to my wife: we started having kids the same year I co-founded TACEO. The last few years have been the most intense of our lives. There would have been a much easier route. Thank you for not taking it. #Privacy #DigitalInfrastructure #DeepTech #Founders

The TACEO Network is live! A private execution layer for digital infrastructure. It encrypts and distributes sensitive computation across independent operators so that no single party controls the data, the keys, or the outcome. The cryptographic infrastructure behind it has already been deployed in production, supporting proof of human verification for nearly 18 million people through World. Today, we are publicly launching the network and opening it to new applications. What's live today: → Production workloads running through World and ZKPassport → 10 independent node operators including Nethermind, P2P.org, InfStones, and cryptography labs at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague and ISEC TU Graz → Purpose-built privacy services for identity, proof generation, private data structures, and biometrics Building on identity, payments, or agentic infrastructure? Talk to us: hello@taceo.io

Agents Need Private, Verifiable Actions at Scale. No Current Infrastructure Delivers That. People don't care what a solution could also do. They want their specific problem solved. Nothing more. That sounds obvious. But it's the lesson the cryptographic infrastructure space keeps refusing to learn. Three years ago we almost built the wrong thing. The dream was encrypted verifiable computation for arbitrary programs. Prove anything, keep it private. Hard to argue with on a whiteboard. It would have taken years. And been so slow nobody would use it. We shipped something narrower instead. Then after two funding rounds the dream crept back. Maybe now. Maybe the market caught up. Last summer World gave us the reminder we needed. They needed private verifiable identity actions at a scale no general-purpose cryptography tool could touch. Not in theory. In production. ASAP. We designed one primitive. Hardened for production. It worked. That's when it clicked. People don't care what a solution could also do. Product teams don't reach for privacy tools while building. They reach for them when they're already at scale and something broke or a regulator arrived. By then a tool built for developers doesn't survive contact with real demand. So teams centralize. Not as a choice. As the only thing that works. Non-human identities already outnumber human employees 96 to 1 in financial services. When an agent makes a financial commitment the question isn't whether funds moved. It's whether that agent was authorized, under what constraints, on whose behalf, provably, without leaking the principal's strategy. Nothing in current infrastructure answers that. Agent identity isn't a login. It's a delegation chain. Without a cryptographic primitive for that chain you get surveillance as a side effect of basic operation, or you trust whoever controls the convention. Once that runs through a closed platform you can't migrate it. Finance consolidates fast. Identity locks in slower but deeper. That's what we've been building at TACEO. The cryptographic primitives identity and finance actually need, at the performance level that makes them viable outside a research paper. The infrastructure for the agentic economy is being built right now. Open cryptographic primitives or closed platform plumbing. That's the choice getting made. We think the window is still open. Barely.

Our team recently published two security audit reports for TACEO covering their Circom and Noir circuits used in privacy-preserving nullifier infrastructure. You can read the full reports, including our findings, here: https://lnkd.in/exRMAad

We'll be at Blockworks' Digital Asset Summit 2026 in NYC later this month! Together with Archetype, we're hosting a closed-door unconference on what's actually hard about onchain payments >> compliance, privacy, and the constraints that emerge in production. No panels. No pitches. Just the hardest problems in the room. Reach out to us or the Archetype team for an invite!