Taceo Brings Confidential Payments to Public Blockchains
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Taceo launched Merces, a way to hide payment details on public blockchains. It keeps transfers private for users but traceable for regulators, which is the whole trick.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Public blockchains are transparent by design, and for banks that has always been the problem. If a company’s wallet is known, its payroll can be tracked. Suppliers can even see what rivals are getting paid. Taceo, a cryptography start-up from Graz, thinks it has a cleaner answer than the usual crypto privacy playbook.
The company has launched Merces, its second product. It is live on Monad and World Chain, and Taceo says it already uses the system for its own internal transfers. The pitch is simple enough: keep payment amounts and recipients hidden from the blockchain, while still letting supervisors and auditors verify that the numbers add up.
Under the hood, Merces combines multiparty computation with zero-knowledge proofs. Balances are split across several independent machines, and the chain stores only a cryptographic summary rather than full transaction details. After each round of transfers, the network produces proof that the transactions were valid and that nobody spent funds they did not have. Taceo calls this “compliant privacy,” which is a neat way of saying privacy that regulators can still live with.
That matters because the company is aiming at financial institutions, not just crypto hobbyists. It has already published the full cryptographic specification on the IACR ePrint portal, and CEO Lukas Helminger says the team spent more than a year adapting the tech for finance. The launch also comes with four integration partners: IntellectEU, LayerZero, Orion Finance and Zenith. Some are at the demo stage, some are still working toward tests, and LayerZero’s work is only a testnet prototype for now.
Taceo is also leaning on its work with World, the iris-scanning project co-founded by Sam Altman. The company says its MPC system now protects the data of more than 18 million people in 160 countries. It raised $5.5 million in seed funding in the summer of 2025, led by Archetype VC. None of that guarantees banks will adopt Merces, of course. But in a field full of privacy theater, Taceo is at least selling something that sounds built for auditors as much as users.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare crypto privacy pitch that doesn’t pretend regulators are decorative. That alone puts Taceo ahead of most of the field, where “confidential” usually means “good luck explaining this to compliance.” The bigger tell is that the company is chasing bank integrations, because that is where privacy tech either becomes infrastructure or becomes another demo.
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