TACEO and Aztec to bring Private Shared State to Ethereum

TACEO and Aztec Foundation are teaming up to create a Private Shared State, an encrypted environment that supports updates, multi-computation and auditing under one private decentralized roof.

TACEO, the company behind Worldcoin’s encrypted iris-scanning network and the largest known multiparty computation database, has partnered with the Aztec Foundation, nonprofit organization that supports the Aztec Network, to create a Private Shared State on Ethereum.

The partnership claims it would allow multiple parties to verify blockchain transactions and contracts, without exposing the underlying information or relying on a centralized entity to verify them. It combines TACEO’s collaborative computation abilities with Aztec’s privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum (ETH).

TACEO CEO Lukas Helminger, tells crypto.news that the PSS serves to extend the capabilities of multiparty computation or MPC to new areas that it was previously limited to. The system will enable multiple users to collaborate on encrypted data sets over which computation is done.

“In brief, PSS lets multiple parties jointly maintain and compute over a single, shared piece of private state, and then commit that state on-chain with a proof that’s publicly verifiable,” said Helminger.

Through the collaboration, Aztec developers will be able to use enhanced tooling that supports complex and collaborative computing. Developers will be able to perform general-purpose computation on encrypted data from different sources, yielding functionality and privacy beyond what web2 is capable of.

The PSS is poised to facilitate a range of different use cases, including trustless financial markets, collaborative AI model training, cheat-proof on-chain gaming and data sovereignty frameworks.

TACEO CEO: ‘Our approach is different’

TACEO CEO Lukas Helminger explains how the Private Shared State differs from run-of-the-mill multiparty computation solutions as it allows for arbitrary computation on encrypted data, as well as the possibility to generate a proof of correctness of that computation.

According to Helminger, this approach creates a “persistent state that no single entity can access, but can be updated over time,” enabling multiple parties to jointly maintain and compute over the same private state. This sets PSS apart from ZKMPC, which he said focuses on one-off secure computations without providing an on-chain state model that contracts can reference.

The company also distinguishes its work from NuCypher’s threshold cryptography framework.

Whereas NuCypher focuses more on traditional use cases for MPC or threshold cryptography to allow signing, decryption delegation and threshold access, PSS goes beyond that by providing shared, updatable private state with on-chain proofs.

Another main difference that sets PSS apart from other solutions is its emphasis on usability for developers.

“Our approach is different: we’re shaping MPC, coSNARKs and PSS into tools that any developer can pick up to build apps, with confidentiality,” Helminger said.

Through its coNoir toolkit, the company hopes to make integration seamless for those already using Noir, Aztec’s zero-knowledge programming language.

“Traditional MPC libraries often came out of academia, which meant they were powerful but not practical. With coNoir, we aim to make it trivial for developers already using coNoir to extend their applications into an MPC and PSS environment,” stated Helminger.

In terms of safety and security, Helminger claims that the protocols that the network is built upon have gone through years of peer-reviewed research and that it is currently undergoing a security assessment, with regular external audits planned once the system stabilizes.

“By the very nature of MPC, no single node learns the plaintext, and confidentiality holds as long as the threshold of colluding nodes is not exceeded,” he said.

How does the Private Shared State fare against quantum computing?

Many experts view quantum computing as a potential threat to cryptocurrency as it evolves at a rapid pace. In fact, many have predicted that with enough power it could one day break Bitcoin’s encryption and gain access to wallets, an event often referred to as “Q Day.”

Most recently, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that there is currently a 50-50 possibility that in five years time, quantum computers will be strong enough to crack the cryptographic safeguards protecting Bitcoin wallets.

When asked how TACEO and Aztec’s PSS will fare against the threat of quantum computing, TACEO CEO Lukas Helminger said that some parts of the stack, such as secret sharing within MPC environments are “already information-theoretically secure and naturally post-quantum.”

“Where quantum risk does come in, such as, in certain proof systems, we’re actively exploring post-quantum secure approaches, including hash-based ZK,” said Helminger.

He explained that the research team working on the project has had prior experience working on post-quantum standards, therefore they are gearing up the system with a clear migration path in mind as the technology continues to evolve.

“We take a crypto-agile approach: the system is designed so we can migrate components to post-quantum alternatives as they mature. For example, where today’s SNARKs rely on elliptic-curve assumptions, we’re already experimenting with hash-based proof systems,” he said.