Ethereum’s founder just put Garbled Circuits on the map as essential privacy tech for Web3’s next chapter.
For COTI, this isn’t a new signal. It’s validation. We’ve already brought Garbled Circuits to production on Ethereum as a Layer 2, and we’ve been shipping real-world use cases with them ever since.
Here’s what Vitalik said, why Garbled Circuits matter, and what COTI has already built with privacy using Garbled Circuits.
Vitalik’s Call for Privacy That Actually Works
In a recent exchange about privacy and decentralization, Buterin emphasized the necessity for multi-party computation (MPC) solutions. These tools allow users to benefit from blockchain transparency while preserving confidentiality where it counts.
Among those tools, Garbled Circuits stand out. They enable encrypted data to be computed collaboratively, ensuring that no party gains access to another’s private inputs.
This isn’t the first time Buterin has pointed in this direction. At ETH Tokyo in 2025, he stated publicly: “Garbled circuits are just much faster than more complicated forms of MPC… there are lots of use cases where it’s valuable.”
More recently, Buterin published a detailed vision for AI-powered decentralized governance where he specifically called out Garbled Circuits as the path to pure-cryptographic security guarantees for multi-party computation. He wrote: “I would love to see at least the two-party case solved with garbled circuits so we can get pure-cryptographic security guarantees.”
That’s precisely the foundation COTI has built its entire privacy infrastructure on.
What Are Garbled Circuits?
Garbled Circuits allow multiple participants to jointly compute a result on encrypted data without revealing their individual inputs. The computation is represented as an encrypted circuit, where each gate and connection transfers only obfuscated information. The result is verifiable and confidential at the same time.
This solves one of blockchain’s fundamental privacy challenges: how do you process sensitive data on a transparent ledger without exposing it?
The cryptographic technique has existed in theory since the 1980s. COTI became the first blockchain network to deploy it in production.
How Garbled Circuits Stack Up
The blockchain privacy landscape includes several approaches. Each addresses specific use cases, but the trade-offs matter more than ever in 2026.
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs have brought important privacy advancements to Ethereum, enabling one party to prove knowledge of information without revealing the data itself. However, ZK is primarily designed for proof verification rather than multi-party computation scenarios.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has opened new possibilities for encrypted computation. However, it remains highly resource-intensive, limiting its applicability for real-time blockchain environments that need speed and accessibility.
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) offer hardware-based isolation, but have faced repeated vulnerabilities that weakened confidence in their use as a foundation for trustless systems.
Garbled Circuits sit in the sweet spot: fast enough for real-time DeFi, lightweight enough for IoT and supply chain data, compliant enough for institutional requirements, and fully EVM-compatible.
COTI’s implementation delivers up to 3,000x faster computation than FHE and runs 250x lighter, making privacy-preserving computation practical for enterprise applications and accessible on any device.
COTI GC EVM: From Theory to Production
COTI’s V2 mainnet launched in March 2025 with the first on-chain implementation of Garbled Circuits, making it the first fully programmable privacy layer for Ethereum to hit the market.
Built in partnership with Soda Labs, the gcEVM is the world’s first production-ready Garbled Circuits implementation for on-chain confidentiality. It offers full EVM compatibility. Developers can write confidential smart contracts in Solidity using familiar tools like Hardhat, simply adding privacy parameters to unlock multi-party computation capabilities.
And unlike projects still in testnet, COTI has spent the past year proving it works. Across multiple sectors. At scale.
In Production: DeFi
On-chain arbitrage is one of the most competitive arenas in DeFi. Finding opportunities is only half the battle. On public blockchains, the transparency that makes decentralization possible also makes strategies visible. Competing bots can observe, copy, and front-run trades before they execute.
Bancor’s Arb Fast Lane has integrated COTI’s Garbled Circuits to solve exactly this problem. By encrypting sensitive execution inputs at the protocol level, traders can protect their strategies without hiding the entire transaction. Thresholds are encrypted before broadcast. The smart contract still enforces them during execution. But the values are never exposed in plaintext to competing bots or the broader network.
This is selective encryption applied at the exact point where transparency becomes a liability. It shifts the competition back to where it belongs: discovery and execution efficiency, rather than simple observation-based extraction.
It’s the first live example of Garbled Circuits powering private DeFi execution on-chain. And it’s just the beginning.
In Production: Healthcare
Perhaps the most striking validation came from an entirely different sector.
In partnership with StaTwig, the global supply chain company behind VaccineLedger (a UN-recognized Digital Public Good and winner of The Trinity Challenge), COTI completed a landmark pilot in Bangladesh under the national Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI).
The numbers speak for themselves:
10 million+ blockchain transactions processed in one month
Zero sensitive data exposed. All sensor data encrypted at the application level before touching the blockchain
Total cost: ~400 COTI tokens (~$5 USD) for the entire pilot
Validated by Bangladesh’s public health officials under the Directorate General of Health Services
The system monitored vaccine cold chains in real time using IoT sensors on refrigerators, freezers, and cold rooms. COTI’s Garbled Circuit logic evaluated alert conditions (temperature breaches, humidity anomalies, equipment failures) directly on encrypted data, without ever decrypting it into plaintext.
Privacy-preserving blockchain running at national scale, in a live government health program, processing 10 million transactions for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. That’s not a proof of concept. It’s a proof of economics.
In Production: Enterprise and Institutions
COTI’s institutional traction extends well beyond a single pilot.
EEA Privacy Working Group: COTI officially joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Privacy Working Group alongside the Ethereum Foundation, Consensys (Linea), EY (Nightfall), Polygon, and others. Together, they’re shaping the privacy standards that will drive real-world adoption, and COTI is at the table.
RWA Tokenization: The partnership with Zoniqx, the Silicon Valley fintech leader in institutional-grade RWA tokenization, is designed to bring the world’s first privacy-enabled real-world assets on-chain. COTI’s Garbled Circuits are being embedded directly into Zoniqx’s platform for confidential issuance, encrypted transfers, and selective disclosure that meets MiCA and SEC requirements.
Hardware-Level Privacy: United Network became the first hardware wallet to integrate COTI’s privacy infrastructure, enabling confidential transactions with a physical card tap. Private keys stored locally, zero server-side backups.
Each of these is a milestone. Together, they form a pattern: COTI isn’t pitching privacy to institutions. Institutions are pulling COTI into their infrastructure.
In Production: The Builders
The final validation is perhaps the most forward-looking.
If anyone can build an app with AI tools, the platform they build on becomes the differentiator. And if that platform offers programmable privacy by default, you unlock an entirely new class of builders and applications.
COTI has launched the COTI Vibe Code Challenge: a 30-day campaign where anyone can build an app or game, mint a privacy token, and ship a real Web3 product on COTI Network. This campaign provides AI-powered tools, prompt packs, live coding sessions, and the opportunity to launch as a real project on COTI.
This is the thesis coming full circle. COTI built the privacy infrastructure. Proved it works in DeFi, healthcare, and enterprise. And now it’s opening the door to anyone with an idea.
About COTI
COTI is the programmable privacy layer for Web3. Powered by high-performance Garbled Circuits, COTI brings fast, low-cost, flexible, and compliant privacy to any blockchain. With privacy that’s programmable by design, COTI enables the next generation of DeFi, payments, identity, governance, and AI.
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