The internet we’ve built is a magnificent paradox. It’s a vast, interconnected network that allows us to share information instantly, yet it’s built on a foundation of fundamental mistrust. We’re constantly asked to hand over our most sensitive data to central authorities and big tech, hoping they’ll act as benevolent custodians, which turns our private data into a massive ‘honeypot’ that is perpetually at risk of compromise. We’re left with a choice: participate and give up our privacy, or opt out and be left behind. What feels like a bug is sold as a feature of the system as it was designed.
For a while now, thoughts have been stirring and we start to ask - what if we could reimagine this foundation? What if we could build a network where collaboration and privacy aren’t mutually exclusive?
We’ve long had the cryptographic tools to fix this, Zero-Knowledge (ZK) and Multiparty Computation (MPC), but the path to mainstream adoption has been fragmented. Today, we are proud to announce a landmark partnership that changes this. TACEO, the company building the network for secure computation on encrypted data, is partnering with the Aztec Foundation, the non-profit organization stewarding the pioneering privacy-focused Layer 2 protocol on Ethereum.
This collaboration is a deliberate effort to solve one of the internet’s biggest unsolved problems: the lack of a Private Shared State on a public, verifiable network.
The Power of Private Shared State
Think about the internet today. Our data lives in isolated, siloed databases, controlled by companies who see our personal information as a resource to be monetized. We can’t truly “share” data in a meaningful way; we can only grant access. This creates a deeply fractured, fragile, invasive, and inefficient system.
Private Shared State (PSS) is the antithesis of this model. It’s a secure, encrypted environment where multiple parties can compute, update, and audit data together without exposing the underlying information. Imagine a digital commons where we can collectively work with our most sensitive data (e.g., social preferences, financial transactions, or personal identities) without anyone, not even the platform itself, seeing the clear inputs.
The real magic happens when you combine PSS with a decentralized network. Today, we have public blockchains that offer transparency and trust but zero privacy. We can verify that a transaction happened, but everyone can see the details. Aztec’s network provides private, single-user computation, allowing people to transact without revealing their personal data. With this new integration, we’re taking the next logical step. By combining TACEO’s pioneering work on collaborative SNARKs (coSNARKs) with Aztec’s robust Layer 2 privacy protocol on Ethereum, we are bringing this vision to life.
For too long, these powerful cryptographic tools have been a dark art, accessible primarily to cryptographers. While ZK development has recently become more accessible (largely thanks to Aztec,) the complexity of building and deploying applications with MPC has been a major barrier for developers. That’s why this partnership is so crucial. We are making MPC accessible to developers for the first time without them needing to be cryptographers.
How? Through coNoir, tooling that extends Noir. Noir is a universal language for zero-knowledge proofs, built by Aztec and supported by a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. CoNoir allows developers to easily lift their existing Noir applications into a multiparty computation setting.
Aztec developers will have new tools to build multiplayer apps and the infrastructure to support them. By establishing a credibly neutral and trustworthy MPC network, we provide a foundation on which developers can leverage coSNARKs to build applications with full confidence in the integrity and confidentiality of their computations.
From Financial Silos to Collaborative AI
The benefits are clear for finance, but the implications are profound and stretch far beyond that.
It has long been known that financial institutions operate in a web of private, costly, and inefficient systems. They can’t easily collaborate on data to build new services or combat fraud because they either can’t compute on encrypted data or are bound by privacy regulations. With PSS, they can compute and prove on confidential data without revealing it, opening the door to a new era of trustless, collaborative financial markets.
But the potential extends even further, especially into the world of AI agents and digital identity.
Today, ZK is making it increasingly popular for users to prove aspects of their identity, like being over 18 or a resident of a certain country, without revealing their underlying personal data. However, compliance often requires more than simple proof. It demands the ability to perform computations on private data to satisfy regulatory requirements, such as anti-money laundering (AML) or know-your-customer (KYC) checks, which ZK alone cannot always fulfill. By combining MPC with ZK identity, we can achieve a new level of compliance. A user’s encrypted identity data can be used to perform computations that verify compliance without revealing the sensitive information itself.
Similarly, autonomous AI agents face a difficult trade-off: to be truly useful, they need access to sensitive user data, but doing so compromises privacy. This limits their ability to operate effectively and collaboratively. By combining TACEO’s collaborative computation with the Aztec Network, we could build AI agents that operate on Private Shared State. For example, imagine a group of AI agents tasked with scheduling a meeting across multiple people’s calendars. To find a time slot, the agents only need to know which times are collectively free. They don’t need to see the private details of every calendar entry. Each agent can also bring its own confidential context (e.g., a user’s preference to avoid scheduling during “dinnertime” at 6 PM) and this information can be factored into the computation without being revealed to the other agents or the underlying system.
Gaming studios could also build cheat-proof on-chain games where the game’s logic can be verified publicly without revealing the sensitive state of the game itself. This enables a new class of secure, intelligent applications that can collaborate on confidential data in a trustless environment, preserving user privacy by default.
Steps Towards A New Internet
As much as this partnership is a technical integration, it’s also a statement of intent. We believe that the digital world we build should reflect our best human values; trust, collaboration, and respect for individual dignity. For too long, we’ve settled for a digital model that forces a false choice between utility and privacy. Today, we’re taking a definitive step to reject that compromise. We’re offering a third path; new tools, a new way of thinking about how we interact, transact, and create, together.
Join us as we build a more secure, more collaborative, and more humane internet, where privacy is a given, not a gamble.
To learn more about how TACEO is empowering a new era of private, verifiable computation, visit us at https://taceo.io/ and follow our journey on X at https://x.com/TACEO_IO.
