Lukas Helminger, CEO and co-founder of TACEO
The stablecoin market surpassed $250 billion in 2025 and is evolving fast; from a trading instrument to a real‑world payments rail for payroll, supplier settlements, and financial contracts. But that evolution exposes blockchain’s greatest vulnerability: when finance goes on‑chain, everything becomes public.
In September, AllUnity and Zebec announced a partnership to advance stablecoin payroll. This is where blockchain’s Achilles’ heel becomes obvious; inherently public, all salaries would be on-chain and visible for all to see. Public blockchains like Ethereum are transparent by design – with each transaction revealing addresses, amounts, and token types.
Financial institutions face a binary choice: use public chains and expose sensitive data, or build costly private networks that isolate them from the wider ecosystem of wallets, exchanges, and developer tools. Neither approach is viable for payroll, B2B payments, or complex contracts where confidentiality and compliance are non‑negotiable.
A single privacy incident can trigger regulatory scrutiny, litigation, and brand damage. Even without a breach, visible transaction flows create risks of market manipulation and unfair advantages in negotiations. The challenge is clear: how to keep transactions verifiable and compliant while protecting the data itself.
Cryptography for crypto
A new model called Private Shared State (PSS) enables multiple parties to update shared on-chain data while keeping sensitive details private.
Think of a payroll run. Each employee’s salary is encrypted, but the employer and the payment processor can still prove that totals add up, that taxes and benefits are correct, and that only approved wallets receive funds. Outsiders see a valid transaction, but not the numbers behind it.
PSS combines two proven cryptographic approaches. The first is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) – which lets you prove that a statement is true without showing the data behind it. You can show that a transfer stays within limits, that a user passed Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, or that a balance is sufficient, all without exposing the numbers. The second is Multiparty Computation (MPC) – which lets several parties compute on encrypted data so that no single participant sees the full picture.
An MPC network would allow payment providers, issuers, and potentially an auditor to collaborate on encrypted data to make payments, verify and audit transactions, and check compliance. Together, they can update the state and publish proofs to the chain without any of them seeing the exact details.
Beyond stablecoins
The same principles apply to a much wider range of financial services. Banks can use verifiable encrypted compute to make credit scoring safer and more accurate, assess spending risks without exposing individual transactions, or run anti‑money‑laundering checks across shared datasets without sharing sensitive customer information.
For identity verification, MPC‑based KYC processes let institutions validate identities while keeping data encrypted. This reduces the risk of breaches, eliminates duplication, and accelerates onboarding. It also enables selective disclosure: a user can prove they are over 18 or resident in a particular country without exposing their full passport or address.
A practical path forward
How does this work in practice for stablecoins on public chains? The issuer keeps using the blockchain of choice, while a privacy layer operates on top. Token transfers could include encrypted fields for amounts and recipients. Smart contracts verify zero-knowledge proofs to confirm compliance rules such as sanctions checks and transaction limits, while MPC services could grant auditors and regulators with the appropriate mandate and reason access to limited disclosures.
For users, nothing changes; wallets remain simple, transaction signing works as it always has. Gas fees stay predictable because most computation happens off-chain and proofs are efficiently batched. Institutions retain privacy without leaving the public blockchain, and regulators gain provability without direct exposure to private data.
This model preserves what made stablecoins successful in the first place: fast settlement, global reach, and programmability. It adds privacy without sacrificing security or transparency, avoids the cost and isolation of private chains, and supports compliance by making controls provable.
The next wave of adoption
After years of trade‑offs, the balance between privacy and verifiability is finally within reach. Zero‑knowledge and multiparty computation technologies have matured from research concepts into production systems, and regulators are beginning to recognize cryptographic assurance as valid evidence of compliance. These advances are arriving just as digital‑asset infrastructure reaches institutional scale, making verifiable privacy not a theoretical goal, but an operational necessity.
As stablecoins expand from trading into payrolls, B2B settlement, and financial contracts, verifiable privacy will define the next wave of adoption, enabling digital money that is both transparent and trustworthy at scale.