Partnership aims to enhance Ethereum privacy
TACEO, the company behind Worldcoin’s encrypted iris-scanning network, has joined forces with the Aztec Foundation to develop what they’re calling a Private Shared State (PSS) for Ethereum. This collaboration brings together TACEO’s expertise in multiparty computation with Aztec’s privacy-focused Layer 2 solution.
The core idea here is pretty interesting. They want to create an encrypted environment where multiple parties can work together on computations without anyone seeing the underlying data. It’s like having a secure room where people can collaborate on sensitive information, but the room itself keeps everything private.
Lukas Helminger, TACEO’s CEO, explained to me that this system allows multiple users to maintain and compute over shared private data, then commit that state to the blockchain with a verifiable proof. That last part is crucial – it means you get both privacy and accountability.
How this differs from existing solutions
What makes this approach different from traditional multiparty computation? Helminger was pretty clear about the distinctions. Most MPC solutions focus on one-time secure computations, but PSS creates a persistent state that multiple parties can update over time. It’s not just about doing a single calculation securely – it’s about maintaining an ongoing private environment.
The company also distinguishes their work from other privacy solutions like NuCypher’s threshold cryptography. While NuCypher focuses on traditional MPC use cases like signing and decryption delegation, PSS aims for broader functionality with shared, updatable private state.
I think the developer experience aspect is particularly noteworthy. They’re building tools that make it easier for developers to work with these complex privacy technologies. Their coNoir toolkit, for example, is designed to integrate seamlessly with Aztec’s Noir programming language.
Practical applications and security considerations
The potential use cases they’re talking about range from trustless financial markets to collaborative AI training and cheat-proof gaming. That last one caught my attention – imagine on-chain games where the game logic remains private but verifiable.
Security is always the big question with these systems. Helminger mentioned that their protocols have undergone years of peer-reviewed research and are currently being assessed through security audits. The nature of MPC itself provides some inherent protection – no single node learns the plaintext data, so confidentiality holds unless a threshold of nodes collude.
Quantum computing concerns
With all the recent talk about quantum computing threatening cryptocurrency security, I was curious how PSS would handle this challenge. Helminger noted that some components, like secret sharing within MPC environments, are already information-theoretically secure against quantum attacks.
For other parts of the system that might be vulnerable, they’re taking what he calls a “crypto-agile” approach. This means designing the system so they can migrate components to post-quantum alternatives as those technologies mature. They’re already experimenting with hash-based proof systems as alternatives to current SNARKs that rely on elliptic-curve cryptography.
It’s reassuring to hear they’re thinking about future-proofing, though quantum computing threats still feel somewhat distant. The research team apparently has experience with post-quantum standards, which gives them a head start on planning for these eventualities.
What strikes me about this partnership is how it combines practical developer tools with ambitious privacy goals. Making complex cryptographic techniques accessible to ordinary developers could be the key to wider adoption of privacy-preserving technologies on Ethereum. The success will likely depend on how well they balance security with usability – a challenge that has tripped up many privacy projects before them.
