TACEO debuts Merces for secure blockchain transactions

By Divya Shah

TACEO, a provider of secure computation software for encrypted data, has launched Merces, a privacy-preserving payments network designed to support real-world financial transactions on blockchain networks. The platform is now live on Monad and World Chain. 

Merces is built to address one of the key barriers to institutional adoption of public blockchains: transaction confidentiality. By enabling private transfers while retaining blockchain-based verification, the platform aims to support banks, corporates and other financial institutions seeking to move financial activity on-chain. 

TACEO is a cryptography company that emerged from TU Graz (Graz University of Technology) in 2022 and is backed by investors including a16z CSX. 

“Banks and corporates have not avoided public blockchains because of speed or cost. It is because no serious business can publish every payment it makes,” said Lukas Helminger, CEO and Co-founder of TACEO.  

“Merces is our second product, built on cryptography already trusted to protect identity for millions of people, and now applied to money,” he added. 

To support broader adoption, TACEO has partnered with four organisations to build integrations covering key onchain finance use cases. 

IntellectEU, a banking infrastructure provider, is integrating Merces with its CatalyX platform to connect the solution with bank back-office systems and regulated financial institutions. 

LayerZero, the cross-chain interoperability protocol, is developing an integration that will enable confidential Merces balances to move across multiple blockchain networks. 

Meanwhile, Orion Finance is working with TACEO to bring privacy capabilities to tokenised investment vaults while maintaining transparency around investment performance for investors. 

TACEO is also collaborating with Zenith, an extension for the Canton Network, to enable shared-state privacy. The integration is intended to allow multiple participants to transact against the same financial position without gaining visibility into the complete underlying data. 

Merces keeps balances and counterparty information off public ledgers. Rather than recording transaction details directly onchain, the blockchain stores only a cryptographic representation of the system’s state.  

Actual balances are divided into secret shares and distributed across multiple independent computers, preventing any single participant from accessing the complete dataset. 

The platform combines multiparty computation (MPC) with cryptographic proofs to verify that transactions are valid and adequately funded without exposing sensitive financial information. TACEO refers to this combined approach as coSNARKs.