TACEO Network: How It Works

While developing privacy-preserving MPC protocols for biometric uniqueness, we saw that teams were spending significant effort assembling and operating MPC networks with trusted counterparties.

The TACEO Network removes this burden by providing shared MPC infrastructure through a set of privacy services, acting as a private execution layer for digital infrastructure. Each service running on the network coordinates execution across committees of independent MPC nodes, depending on its performance and integration requirements.

Applications integrate privacy services through APIs. Under the hood, those services coordinate confidential requests across MPC node committees that compute over encrypted shares and return verifiable outputs.

The cryptographic infrastructure behind the network has been deployed in production systems used in World ID, supporting privacy-preserving identity checks for almost 18 million people.

The Missing Layer the TACEO Network provides

Digital systems increasingly depend on shared infrastructure, but sensitive execution is still often centralized.

Consensus layers and settlement rails exist. What is usually missing is an execution layer that can coordinate on private data without introducing a single trusted intermediary.

The TACEO Network introduces this missing layer through private shared state, which is realized using secret-shared data and multiparty computation protocols.

In practice, this means applications can ask scoped questions over sensitive data and receive verifiable answers without any single party seeing the underlying raw inputs or intermediate computation results.

Examples include:

• checking eligibility or policy conditions without disclosing full identity records
• verifying uniqueness without exposing biometric templates
• evaluating private risk or account conditions without revealing complete user data

Only the requested result is revealed. The underlying inputs remain confidential throughout execution.

Interacting with a Service on the Network

Requests generally follow the same high-level flow:

1. Application request
   An application sends a request through a TACEO service API, for example proof generation, OPRF evaluation, or private state updates.

2. Service coordination
   The request is handled by a specific service instance. Each instance has its own cryptographic keys, committee configuration, and operational policy, which can be handled by traditional off-chain processes or an on-chain smart contract.

3. Distributed MPC execution
   A committee of MPC nodes executes the protocol over encrypted or secret-shared inputs. It also optionally generates a coSNARK of the correct execution of the protocol.

4. Threshold completion
   Once the required threshold of nodes completes the protocol, partial outputs are combined into a final result. This can happen in the application or at the end user device, depending on the concrete use-case.

5. Verifiable response
   The service returns the result to the application, optionally including cryptographic artifacts that allow downstream verification.

This model allows many applications to share the same privacy infrastructure (the multiparty computation nodes) while keeping execution logically isolated at the service-instance level.

Depending on the service, coordination may be handled by service-level infrastructure or protocol-level mechanisms.

For an overview of the current services running on the TACEO network, see TACEO Services.