Ethereum has officially entered its second decade. Now, with over $80b of TVL and a new influx of enterprise capital, the need for increased privacy and security has never been more critical. 

Blockchains have clearly demonstrated the strength of transparent systems and the value they can safeguard. We’ve not only become comfortable with transactions being public and codebases being open source, but have built a multitrillion dollar industry largely on the back of this premise of transparency. But not all data can or should be publicly accessible in this way.

Plenty of industries and use cases—like AI, identity verification, and healthcare—could greatly benefit from blockchain’s programmability and transparent nature, but the loss of privacy that can accompany crypto adoption often makes this shift impossible. 

While zero knowledge proofs have been useful for keeping blockchain data private, client-side ZK remains too slow and rigid to give most users that snappy, modern UX that they expect. If we take a step past pure ZK, we’ll find that what we actually need to power modern privacy-enabled apps is private shared state—a way for parties to perform composable and complex computations over encrypted data, at speeds comparable with centralized cloud infrastructure, all without ever revealing the underlying data. Easier said than done. But as it turns out, not impossible.

TACEO is bringing this future to market today.

With CEO Lukas Helminger and CPO Lukas Götz at the helm, TACEO is building programmable privacy into the crypto compute stack. TACEO already provides the MPC protocol that underpins World’s unique ID checks, powering millions of biometric checks per month and securing the data of over 14 million people. This allows for World to verify the humanity of its users in a privacy preserving manner, compliant with GDPR and other regulatory paradigms, without that privacy ever becoming a UX bottleneck.

With the recent launch of their proving network, TACEO:Proof, TACEO is making this type of practically usable privacy widely available to builders. TACEO:Proof combines ZKPs with their MPC network to give any ZK app a privacy-preserving computer that they can securely delegate their proof generation to. This makes ZK apps even more private and secure than conventional forms of proof delegation while delivering faster proving times than what client-side proving enables for the vast majority of users. 

With TACEO, privacy can finally graduate from a cumbersome add-on to a core piece of crypto infrastructure.

We’re thrilled to lead the $5.5M Seed round for TACEO and continue working alongside Lukas, Lukas, and the TACEO team to create safer and more-secure onchain products and experiences.

You can learn more about TACEO on their website, follow them on X at @TACEO_IO, and dive deeper into TACEO:Proof in their docs.

You can also find Lukas’s presentation on coSNARKs at last year’s PETs Research Day at Archetype HQ on our YouTube channel.