Taceo Network enables ‘private shared state’ for hosting sensitive parts of workflow

Austrian startup Taceo, which announced a $5.5M seed funding round last July, has launched public access to the Taceo Network, which a release calls “a private execution layer for digital rails including identity, finance and AI agents.”

The software infrastructure layer for private computation lets organizations run “sensitive identity, biometrics and payment logic on shared digital infrastructure without exposing raw data,” and without typical compliance and operational issues. It is the cryptographic infrastructure supporting World’s World ID, which provides “proof of human” verification for nearly 18 million people.

Taceo is one of several partners that worked with World to develop its anonymous multi-party computation (AMPC). The company’s technology includes a cryptographic tool called coSNARKs that combines Multiparty Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), which is used in World’s iris biometric verification.

The motivating idea behind the Taceo Network is interoperability with privacy – a kind of selective disclosure writ large.

“With stablecoins pushing digital settlement closer to the mainstream and AI agents creating new machine-to-machine use cases, organizations are prioritizing shared digital rails that make payments, identity and other services interoperable across widely used networks,” Taceo says.

But shared public infrastructure comes with compliance risks. Organizations “want the scale and openness of shared infrastructure but cannot expose customer data, business logic, counterparties or internal controls. They may want to use shared digital rails, but still find themselves centralising sensitive parts of the workflow (e.g. identity checks, routing logic, access controls and fraud controls) within a single internal system or provider.”

Data can be shared without decryption

Taceo Network aims to solve this problem by providing a private execution layer – a “private shared state, where multiple parties can compute together while keeping their inputs confidential” – beneath shared digital infrastructure, to host the most sensitive parts of a workflow. Per its website, the network encrypts and distributes sensitive data across independent node operators so that no single party controls the data, the keys, or the outcome. It supports use cases in identity infrastructure, including privacy-preserving biometric authentication and verification services running on the network.

Functions include private reads and writes for applications that need to update shared ledgers without exposing the underlying transaction data; identity and biometric checks for verifying credentials or eligibility of personal data without revealing the data itself, and verifiable computation services for generating proofs that sensitive processing was carried out correctly in high-assurance workflows.

“For decades we’ve had to choose between two models: either sensitive data stays private inside one organization, or it becomes visible in shared systems,” says Lukas Helminger, CEO of Taceo. “With the launch of the Taceo Network, that trade-off starts to disappear. Computation can run across independent operators while the data itself stays encrypted. That changes how the next generation of digital infrastructure can be built. Identity systems, financial services, and AI applications can collaborate without handing control of sensitive data to a single party.”

Philipp Sippl, director and head of engineering at World Foundation, says “over the past two years, we’ve been working closely with TACEO to build and deploy the cryptographic infrastructure used in World ID. It’s exciting to see this infrastructure open up to a broader ecosystem of applications.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  data protection  |  digital identity  |  multi-party computation  |  Taceo  |  World ID