TACEO

As 2024 draws to a close, we're grateful and a little proud when reflecting on our small team's incredible journey. What started as ambitious research has turned into real-world impact that touches millions of lives. A few highlights that make us proud: Our team celebrated personal milestones – from Roman defending his PhD to Daniel and Christian receiving prestigious recognition for their groundbreaking work. We welcomed new family members (including our beloved coffee machine, which might be our most productive team member yet! 😄). What stands out is seeing our vision for privacy materialize. Our MPC solution now helps secure over 9 million people's iris codes, while our coSNARKs technology has been embraced by leading teams in the ZK space. From presenting at ZK11 to launching the coSNARK alphanet at Devcon7, we've seen our tools evolve from research concepts to practical solutions. Watching our small team grow and take on these problems has been amazing. Whether it was late nights during our internal hackathon (congrats to Franco on Secret Shared Santa!), our first side event, or those countless moments of shared excitement over new breakthroughs – it's been a journey of growth, learning, and genuine collaboration. To our partners, supporters, and the incredible crypto community – thank you for being part of our story. As we step into 2025, we're more excited than ever to continue building the future of Private Shared State together. 🚀 Here's to the challenges that made us stronger, the victories that brought us joy, and the coffee that kept us going! https://blog.taceo.io/eoy/

Over the past few weeks, we've dedicated time to celebrating our team. From an internal hackathon to a company retreat, the end-of-year party, and planning for the future at an offsite, we've covered a lot of ground. These moments are special—not just for getting to know each other better but for strengthening the foundations that support our growth every year. We're grateful for one another and immensely appreciate the support from our local and global communities. Some sneak peeks of around the office this week 👀

This week kicks off the first-ever TACEO internal hackathon! ⚒️ The plan? One week for everyone to tackle self-chosen projects. 💡 Why? We’ve gathered ideas all year that needed dedicated time to explore. Now, it’s time to bring the most compelling ones to life. One highlight: 🎅 Secret-shared Santa—an on-chain gift exchange app powered by coSNARKs. Not even the app provider knows who got assigned to whom, and wishlists stay completely private.

Austria produces some of the best tech talent in the world, especially in computer science. I’ve seen this firsthand during my years as a student, researcher, and teacher at our technical universities. The top graduates here could easily compete on a global stage. Yet many end up in roles where their potential isn’t fully realized. Often, these jobs involve navigating bureaucracies and maintaining legacy systems. For ambitious minds who love solving technical challenges, this isn’t just unfulfilling—it’s a misalignment. Why is this happening? Without Big Tech hubs in Austria—or even Europe more broadly—graduates don’t see many options. Most follow the well-trodden path into established industries, unaware of the asymmetric upside Web3 offers. Web3 could be the perfect fit for this top talent. The core ideas of decentralization, privacy, collaboration, and open-source development align deeply with the innovative, independent mindset of these grads. And the technical challenges—whether in cryptography, distributed systems, or privacy-preserving computation—are the kind of puzzles they live for. So why don’t they see it? Because too often, Web3 is viewed through the lens of the “crypto casino” culture. What’s overlooked is the “crypto computer” culture: a world of groundbreaking open-source tech that’s shaping the future of privacy, ownership, and the internet itself. To be clear, Web3 isn’t for everyone. But for the top-tier talent—those who thrive on challenges, push boundaries, and love building from scratch—Web3 is an unmatched opportunity.

CoSNARKs have been heating up since Devcon and some of the leading ZK projects are currently onboarding to try our alphanet for private proof delegation. There are a few slots left, so if you are a ZK project and want to offload some proving in a privacy preserving way, our dms are open.

Last week we established a coSNARK Alphanet with the Cursive team and the Ethereum Foundation's PSE team so that the Cursive Devcon app could privately outsource proof generation. More than 15000 proofs were generated by 1800+ people over 4 days, producing 40 proofs per minute at the peak. Our latest blog post goes more into the details. If you are interesting in using the (invite only) Alphanet for private proof delegation, or for computing on private shared state, get in touch! https://lnkd.in/dHdCfauJ

Episode 3: “The One Where Aisling Connolly Gets Real about ZKs” TACEO ❤️ Watch full episode: https://lnkd.in/eDTWBgkK

We've been excited about Noir for quite some time and began work on coNoir earlier this year. It allows developers to easily compute on private data and we've been really thrilled by the response. This was particularly felt on Monday at NoirCon 0. The program for the whole day was truly impressive. Congrats to the Aztec and Noir teams, and broader community. We can't wait to see what's going to be built in the coming year!

Very much looking forward to Devcon, and in particular this event! Proud to be part of Women in web3Privacy, so much so that I even develop a ✨new talk✨ Would be great to see you there! https://lnkd.in/d8YN9gJ4

Last week we were thrilled to travel to Lisbon for ZK Summit 12! This is one of our favorite events, and where we feel most at home, as this is where the whole ZK industry gathers together for a day of talks, workshops, and networking. Here are some of the highlights! - Franco Nieddu had the opportunity to give a workshop showcasing our coSNARK tooling. He first gave an overview of MPC, and ZK, how they play well together, and walked through hands-on examples in coCircom and coNoir. - Aisling Connolly had the pleasure to join Anna Rose and friends for a panel discussing the upcoming trends in ZK. Seeing the ZK Apps being built, and the ideas and plans that are forming is truly inspiring. The day after the summit, we hosted our very first side event! If you know web3, you'll know that this was a big moment in our journey, and the turnout was great! Huge thanks go to Stefan Plank, Florin Fabsits, and Katharina for being great hosts and ensuring everything runs with the efficiency of a ZK-friendly hash function 😉 There was also a nice program: - We heard an overview of CoSNARKs from Ais, which introduced the topic and addressed many of the questions we've been getting recently. - Vivek from the Cursive team showed us how they plan to use #MPC for Human Connection. The talk was as thoughtful as it was smart and we're amazed how technical cryptographic tools can be used for social good. - Zachary Williamson from Aztec closed the event with an exciting talk about using MPC to accelerate private state models. This is a particularly interesting topic for us as we currently work on network designs, it was amazing to learn from his experience at this pivotal time. Overall, throughout the few days we had such a warm reception, some really excellent questions, great feedback, and learned so much. We cannot commend the ZK Podcast team enough for supporting the industry in such a meaningful way - we're already looking forward to the next summit! Let us know in the comments if you were there, if you have questions, or if there's more information that you'd like!