Exponential Episode 18: Public Privacy

In this episode of Exponential, Aisling Connolly, Chief Strategy Officer at TACEO, joins the show to unpack the deeper technical and philosophical motivations behind verifiable finance. With a background in mathematics, economics, and cryptography, Ais has long been drawn to using rigorous math to solve real-world problems — a mindset that eventually brought her from traditional payments to privacy infrastructure for blockchains.

“We’re building this network for private shared state,” Ais explains, referring to TACEO’s architectural vision. “How can we have it so that we have verifiability, composability, and privacy?” The company’s design leverages multiparty computation (MPC) alongside zero-knowledge proofs, enabling parties to compute on encrypted data while generating proofs of correctness — without exposing sensitive information.

Ais contrasts today’s onchain possibilities with the legacy systems she encountered in traditional finance. “In the TradTech world, you just had to trust the banks and the tech companies… because you only had to trust one or two people,” she explains. “With blockchain, you get verifiability without needing to trust anyone.” 

But that shift also exposes a tradeoff: “You can go check your transactions, but you lose the privacy.” For Ais, this tension between trustlessness and discretion has been a through-line in her career: “I’ve always been focused on the same problem — how can we have verifiability, but with this layer of privacy?”

While privacy has historically been misunderstood or deprioritized, Ais sees the value proposition becoming clearer. “People already do make the choice — they use VPNs, encrypted messengers. And if I can use a privacy protocol that transfers in one second and costs half a cent, I’m not losing efficiency.”

She also points out that many legacy financial systems are held together by inertia, not performance. “If you factor in the real cost of running legacy financial systems — which are 30 years of things built on top of things — they’re not efficient. They’re crumbling.”

As new use cases emerge at the intersection verifiability and finance, Ais believes the infrastructure being built today will soon become the default. “Most people will be using verifiable finance,” she says. “Whether you know it or not.”