TACEO brings privacy layer to x402 payment network

By Parth Prabhudesai

TACEO has launched a live implementation of confidential payments for x402, the emerging open internet payment standard backed by major technology and payments companies including Coinbase and Cloudflare. The release aims to address one of the biggest concerns surrounding blockchain-based payments: transaction privacy.

The integration, built on TACEO’s confidential-token protocol Merces, is now live on Base Sepolia and allows developers to create confidential x402 payments without exposing transaction amounts or balances publicly on-chain. The launch comes as x402 gains momentum as a payment layer for internet-native and machine-to-machine transactions.

x402 recently moved under the governance of the Linux Foundation, with founding members including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Google and Microsoft. According to TACEO, more than 140 million x402 transactions have already been processed, with annualised on-chain payment volume exceeding $600 million.

Unlike standard blockchain payments, which publicly display payment amounts and wallet activity, TACEO’s system uses multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt transaction data while still allowing regulatory and audit verification when required.

Lukas Helminger, CEO and Co-Founder of TACEO, said: “x402 is the most serious attempt to put a payment layer into the internet since the original HTTP specification reserved that status code thirty years ago. The piece it has been missing is privacy.”

He added, “No business runs payroll, treasury or B2B flows on rails where every counterparty and every competitor can see every payment. With TACEO Merces we now have a working implementation that delivers exactly that.”

The company said developers can integrate confidential x402 payments in under five minutes using its public tools and software libraries. TACEO also confirmed that the integration is open-source and designed to support future expansion across additional blockchain networks.