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Confidential payments, treasury, and B2B settlement on public chains

Onchain financial systems offer transparency and programmability, but that transparency comes at a cost. Public transaction data exposes balances, counterparties, and intent, which can be exploited, and which makes onchain rails unusable for most real-world financial operations.

Executing payroll, treasury transfers, vendor payments, or large trades on a public ledger reveals sensitive financial information by default. This creates risks that range from front-running and copy-trading to operational exposure of business relationships, deal sizes, and pricing strategy. For most institutions, it's the reason they aren't on public rails at all.

Traditional finance solves this through private accounts and restricted data access, but relies on centralized intermediaries. The challenge is to get the same confidentiality guarantees on a public, programmable chain, without giving up settlement guarantees or compliance posture.

TACEO's answer: Merces​

TACEO addresses this through Merces, a confidential token transfer protocol that wraps existing ERC-20 tokens (e.g. USDC) into shielded balances on the EVM chain you already use. Balances are held as secret shares across the TACEO Network, state transitions are verified onchain via CoSNARKs, and no single party, including TACEO, sees what anyone holds or sends.

Merces is a complete, integrable privacy layer rather than a new chain or a raw cryptographic toolkit. Stablecoin issuers, fintechs, and payment infrastructure builders white-label it into their products; end users never see TACEO.

This model is particularly relevant for stablecoin-based financial flows, where confidentiality of balances and transfers is required for real-world usage. It also aligns with emerging standards such as x402, which embeds payments directly into HTTP request flows and enables confidential machine-to-machine and AI-agent payments.

Compliance is built into the protocol, not bolted on top: allowlists, AML hooks, programmable reveal rules, and selective-disclosure attestations let regulated entities meet KYC, sanctions, and Travel Rule obligations without running surveillance infrastructure.

This lets financial applications combine the programmability and settlement guarantees of public blockchains with the privacy properties of traditional financial systems.

A live demo runs at merces.taceo.io.

Where to go next​