COTI_Official

Most privacy protocols privatize a fixed menu of actions. Very few let a developer deploy any program at all and run it on encrypted data. Here is the difference, why it is so hard to build, and why the institutions designing the next financial system are already writing it into their requirements.
TL;DR
→ General-purpose privacy means a developer can deploy any program and have it compute over encrypted data. → Single-purpose privacy protects a closed menu of actions, usually transfers. The second is a much harder problem, and it is the one COTI solved.
→ COTI’s gcEVM has been live in production on COTI mainnet since March 2025. Not a testnet. Not a roadmap item.
→ The institutions building the actual financial rails treat confidentiality as a design requirement, not a preference.
→ Payroll, payments, contracts, and settlements each break on a transparent chain in a completely different way. Four failure modes cannot be patched with four bolt-on privacy tools.
→ Garbled Circuits on COTI run up to 3,000x faster and 250x lighter than alternative privacy solutions, light enough for any device, fully EVM-compatible, and written in standard Solidity.
A Category Almost Nobody Has Entered
The demand for privacy from enterprises, institutions is skyrocketing. But with years in development, the world of crypto solutions is still short on delivery.
More than a decade of research, billions in funding, and hundreds of launches with “privacy” in the first line of the documentation. Yet when you ask the precise question, the field thins out immediately.
The billion dollar question: Can a builder deploy an arbitrary program or use cases that computes end-to-end encrypted data on a live network, today?
The COTI answer is yes. The gcEVM, COTI’s EVM implementation powered by Garbled Circuits, has been live on COTI mainnet since March 2025. Developers write confidential contracts in standard Solidity, using Hardhat, choosing what stays encrypted and what stays public inside a single contract.
COTI is not alone on that list, and it is a very short list for a problem this valuable. Avishay Yanai, co-founder of Soda Labs, the cryptography team COTI built its Garbled Circuits protocol with, asked Claude Fable and this was the result:
“…by now there are only two networks with a general-purpose protocol level privacy. Kudos @COTInetwork @Starknet”
Credit where it is due. The rise of privacy benefits everyone building in this space. The list is short because the problem is genuinely hard, not because nobody wanted the prize.
Encrypting data is a solved problem. Computing on data while it stays encrypted, fast enough that a smart contract can do it inside a block, on hardware a normal person owns, is a different discipline entirely.
Garbled Circuits were introduced by Andrew Yao in 1986 and sat largely on the academic shelf for decades because the machines and the optimizations were not ready. The first working implementation arrived in 2004. Bringing a full, optimized Garbled Circuits engine to a live blockchain took another twenty years, and COTI, with Soda Labs, is where that arc finally met production.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly pointed to Garbled Circuits as the path to pure-cryptographic security guarantees for multi-party computation. COTI is the project that shipped it.
What General-Purpose Privacy Actually Means
Here is the distinction that decides everything, and it gets collapsed constantly.
Single-purpose privacy protects a fixed set of actions. The protocol decides in advance what can be confidential, and that menu is closed. Usually it is transfers: move an asset without revealing the amount or the counterparties. This is real engineering and real value.
General-purpose privacy means a developer writes the program, and the program computes over encrypted data. Nobody decided in advance what your confidentiality is for. You did.
The cleanest way to see the difference is to stop arguing about it and look at what a developer can actually build.
A payroll contract. Salary amounts arrive encrypted and stay encrypted. The contract still adds them into a department total, applies a withholding rate, and checks each figure against an approval threshold. Finance gets its numbers. An auditor gets the view it is entitled to. No individual figure is ever exposed, including to the network performing the calculation.
A sealed-bid auction. Every bid is submitted encrypted and stays encrypted through settlement. The contract compares encrypted bids against one another to determine a winner, and the losing bids are never revealed to anyone, not to the other bidders and not to the auctioneer. There is no window in which bidding can be front-run, because there is nothing in the mempool to read.
Order flow that conceals size. Order size stays encrypted while the contract computes against it: routing, slippage limits, execution thresholds. Intent stops being a public signal, so it stops being an attack surface.
Why Enterprises Need Privacy That Adapts to the Business
There is an asymmetry in this market that almost nobody notices.
Ask allocators, banks or asset managers what is the bottleneck to digital assets adoption, and one of the few key missing pieces is confidentiality. Confidentiality and regulatory clarity dominate the conversation.
Now look at the institutions actually building the rails, where the Bank for International Settlements and the central banks behind Project Agorá treat confidentiality not as a feature request but as a design requirement written into the specification.
The people writing the checks are not asking for confidentiality. The people writing the architecture are designing for it as a precondition. That gap is the opportunity.
Circle, announcing Arc Privacy in June 2026, covered the whole surface in a single sentence:
“Public blockchains create challenges because payroll activity, treasury transfers, trading strategies, and customer transactions can become visible to anyone monitoring the network.”
Four use cases, four different failure modes
This is exactly where general-purpose earns its name, because each of these breaks in a different shape.
Payroll. Put compensation on a transparent chain and every employee, recruiter, and competitor can read the whole comp band.
Payments. Vendor and custody relationships are recoverable by anyone with a block explorer and patience. In February 2024, analytics firm Arkham identified roughly 186,000 of MicroStrategy’s 190,000 BTC and published the split across its custodians. The company had disclosed none of it.
Contracts. Business logic leaks before it executes. In June 2022, a Solend borrower’s position, collateral ratio, and exact liquidation price were all public, so the counterparty DAO simply passed an emergency vote to take control of his account. The terms of the position were readable, which is what made them actionable against him.
Settlements. On 12 March 2025, a trader swapped $220,764 in USDC and received $5,271 in USDT. Eight seconds. An MEV bot pulled the pool’s liquidity ahead of the trade and replaced it after. A stablecoin-to-stablecoin settlement, the most boring transaction imaginable, lost 97.6% of its value because the intent was public before it was executed.
Four use cases. Four completely different failure modes. You do not fix that by deploying four separate privacy tools and hoping they compose across your stack. You fix it with one substrate where confidentiality is programmable, and you shape it to the business requirement in front of you.
How General-Purpose Privacy Works on COTI
Programmable Privacy
On COTI, confidentiality is a property you write into the contract, not a mode the chain imposes on you.
The developer decides which values stay encrypted, which computations run over ciphertext, and who is authorized to decrypt a result. Selective disclosure is built in, so an auditor or regulator can be granted exactly the view they are entitled to while everyone else sees ciphertext.
A payroll contract can encrypt amounts while leaving employment status auditable. A settlement system can encrypt position sizes while proving solvency to a supervisor. A treasury can encrypt balances while its issuance stays governed and provable.
Same chain. Same gcEVM. Different confidentiality logic, because the business requirements are different. That is what general-purpose buys you.
MPC and End-to-End Encryption
COTI’s privacy runs on Garbled Circuits, a protocol for secure multi-party computation (MPC) in which several parties jointly compute a function over private inputs and learn only the result.
Data is encrypted before it reaches the network. Computation runs over that encrypted data. The result is offboarded to a user’s key and decrypted client-side. Each user holds their own AES key issued through a precompile, and the network key is split across nodes with threshold cryptography, so no single node can reconstruct it. No operator, validator, or node holds your plaintext.
The trust model rests on a threshold of honest nodes plus battle-tested symmetric-key cryptography. There is no trusted setup ceremony and no dependence on hardware secure enclaves. Because the foundation is symmetric-key, quantum resistance is a matter of key length, and the Helium upgrade already brought native 256-bit arithmetic to mainnet.
One thing COTI is always precise about: COTI encrypts amounts, balances, and computation inputs and outputs. It does not encrypt metadata. Sender, recipient, timestamp, and the fact that a transaction occurred stay public.
That boundary is not a gap being worked around. It is the same boundary every institution named above is describing. The BIS, Agorá, and Circle all scope confidentiality to amounts, positions, and business logic, paired with authorized visibility for the parties entitled to it. Selective disclosure, not disappearance.
Garbled Circuits Performance
Confidential computation only matters if it is fast enough to actually deploy, and this is where the choice of cryptography decides the outcome.
COTI’s Garbled Circuits implementation runs up to 3,000x faster and 250x lighter than alternative privacy solutions. Light enough for any device, including mobile, with no specialized hardware. Most of the heavy work happens once, at the garbling stage, so the on-chain operation stays fast.
There is no proving-infrastructure dependency and no new language to learn. The gcEVM is fully EVM-compatible, so Solidity developers build with the tools they already use.
And it is carrying real weight. COTI’s GC mainnet launched in March 2025 and has processed over 125 million on-chain transactions. Bancor’s Arb Fast Lane encrypts execution thresholds to protect arbitrage strategies from front-running. VaccineLedger ran 10 million+ privacy-preserving supply-chain transactions in Bangladesh for under $5 in total cost. United Network shipped the first hardware wallet with COTI’s privacy built in.
The Demand Is Documented. The Supply Is Thin.
The institutions designing the next generation of financial infrastructure have already concluded they cannot operate without confidentiality. The BIS calls it a prerequisite. Central banks are writing it into formal requirement lists. Circle named payroll, treasury, trading, and customer transactions out loud.
Meanwhile, the number of networks where a developer can deploy an arbitrary program that computes over encrypted state, in production, today, is short enough to say in one breath.
COTI was built for exactly that gap. Confidentiality that is programmable, fast enough for production, compliant by design, and general-purpose by architecture. Not privacy as a switch you flip. Privacy as something you build with.
That is what it means to be the programmable privacy layer for Web3. Privacy built in, not bolted on.
Start building → https://docs.coti.io
Stay COTI.
About COTI:
COTI is the programmable privacy layer for Web3. Built for enterprises, builders, and agents. Powered by high-performance Garbled Circuits and enterprise-grade COTI Nightfall (ZK), COTI enables encrypted computation on any public blockchain. Fast, low-cost, and compliant privacy across DeFi, AI, and beyond.
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