Shahaf Bar-Geffen

CEO for COTI @COTInetwork | Designing an AI-driven course to help anyone launch and grow their own business

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

Privacy for every chain, value back to COTI
🎙️ New message from COTI CEO, @shahafbg

In the update:
✅ Privacy-on-Demand: GC to top chains
🔥 Privacy growth fuels COTI's growth
📝 First major chain beyond Ethereum, already signed!

Watch 👇🏻

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Worth reading even if you're not technical.

Here's the frame: institutions are entering crypto, and they can't operate on fully transparent chains. That makes privacy the next race.
It won't be won by one chain hoarding private apps. It will be won by the dominant privacy technology that serves every chain, with the value flowing to whoever operates it.

That's exactly the position COTI is playing for. Garbled Circuits are live on mainnet, 3,000x faster than alternative privacy tech, and already extending to Ethereum and other L1s/L2s through Privacy-on-Demand. Not a privacy chain. The privacy layer other chains plug into.

Filming a video on this in the coming days.

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

https://t.co/GsTf6yCWjc

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

$COTI privacy is built to scale 🏙️

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

As a reminder, @COTInetwork goal is to be top 3 in Private DeFi. It's not a category yet, but it will be. It will be measured by Private TXs and TVL made Private (TVP!?!).

We continue to build.

ethereum:0xddb3422497e61e13543bea06989c0789117555c5

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

https://t.co/uCLyCY14K6

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Important blog post about how @COTInetwork is built

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

https://t.co/x00sNPRqPp

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

New message from COTI CEO, Shahaf 🎙️
Privacy is the dominant trend in crypto, not a phase.

In this update, @shahafbg covers:
✅ COTI for AI Agents & Web4 Grant Program
✅ Privacy Portal for private tokens
✅ Privacy-on-Demand: Ethereum is next

Still early. Still shipping.
Stay COTI 👇

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Most privacy work focuses on transactions. Send X to Y without revealing balances or addresses.

Private governance is a harder problem. The voter needs anonymity. The vote needs to be verifiable. The outcome needs to be tamper-proof.

Private votes on public outcomes. @COTInetwork

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

DeFi will drag privacy across the chasm.

Not because builders suddenly care about cypherpunk values. Because users, funds and institutions will not park real capital on transparent rails.

This is where the next generation of DeFi gets built. @COTInetwork

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Two predictions for the agent economy.

First, every serious agent ends up with a wallet. Web3 rails handle counterparty risk and payment in ways closed systems do not.

Second, those wallets and the data behind them have to be private. Transparent ledgers do not work when an agent is acting on your salary, your identity, or your medical record.

The agent economy and the privacy economy are converging.

@COTInetwork

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Most of the AI alignment debate stops at the model. The harder question lives one layer up.

Agents will increasingly act on user data. Wallets, identity, financial state, health records.

Whether those agents run in a closed lab or an open network, the user still needs to know whose data the agent sees and what it can reveal.

Privacy-preserving compute is the missing primitive in the AI stack.

@COTInetwork

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Privacy as a binary toggle is a dead end.

Real adoption needs the user to choose: what to reveal, to whom, for how long.

That's the gap programmable privacy fills. Not anonymity. Selective disclosure as a protocol feature.

The institutions waiting on the sidelines have been asking for exactly this.
@COTInetwork

[binji @binji_x]

@sporadica https://t.co/eiUPObIdlO

Privacy is not about hiding but about choosing what to reveal

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

A bug in a transparent system leaks money. A bug in a privacy primitive leaks the user.

You can't refund a leak.

@COTInetwork ethereum:0xddb3422497e61e13543bea06989c0789117555c5

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Every serious institution I've talked to in the last twelve months says the same thing about onchain finance: they can't move on without privacy that resists both hacks and misuse, at the same time.

Selective disclosure for regulators. Full confidentiality from competitors. That's not a single primitive. It's an architecture.
ZK proves. Garbled Circuits compute.

We've been building both at @COTInetwork because pretending one does the other is what kept institutions out of crypto for ten years.

[Wei Dai @_weidai]

Onchain finance needs threat-resistant privacy

→ Real-world & institutional finance cannot move onchain without privacy
→ To prevent misuse (e.g. laundering of hacked funds), the only viable solution is to build threat-resistant privacy

More in my op-ed in Forbes 👇

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

It's great to see that @COTInetwork is recognized for its ongoing contribution to privacy on @ethereum .
Thank you for your leadership and efforts for our industry @EntEthAlliance

[Enterprise Ethereum Alliance | eea.eth @EntEthAlliance]

📣 The EEA Privacy Working Group is releasing its first report: "State of Privacy on Ethereum for Enterprise".

7 EEA member organizations and 1 comprehensive map of enterprise privacy on Ethereum.

More on what this means 🧵⬇️

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Distribution is how privacy gets normalized.
The regulatory conversation looks different when the on-ramp is a Gemini card, not a mixer.

[Tyler Winklevoss @tyler]

Earn ZEC every time you swipe with the @Gemini Credit Card.

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

@_weidai @1kxnetwork @0xMiden @zksync @inconetwork One thing missing from this list is the Garbled Circuits side of the stack. ZK proves what happened, TEEs run private logic in hardware. GC runs it cryptographically, no enclave to trust.
That's the lane @COTInetwork has been building in. Different math, same thesis.

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

@VitalikButerin is right: ZK-payments should be default in the agentic era.
But settlement is the easy half.
Agents also need to compute privately. To negotiate and execute without leaking intent.
ZK proves. Garbled Circuits compute.
@COTInetwork has both.

[Wu Blockchain @WuBlockchain]

Vitalik Signals "ZK Payments" as Next Standard for the Agent Era

Vitalik Buterin @VitalikButerin stated that at the protocol level for native agent standards, the next step for payments is likely ZK Payments. He believes that in AI scenarios, persistent pseudonymous identities will eventually lose all privacy.

The team is developing a ZK API to isolate each request, which protects privacy without requiring an on-chain transaction for every single action, and can be combined with security deposits to prevent abuse.

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

The privacy stack is splitting into two questions:
What can you prove without revealing? ZK.
What can you compute without revealing? Garbled Circuits.

Both can be post-quantum.
Both can be EVM-compatible.
Both are @COTInetwork

[COTI Foundation @COTInetwork]

Hey Zeev (@thepulsare) 👋

Appreciate your request for clarity and appreciate your patience in offering a response. Here are is a fully reply to your open letter.

On Partnerships & Value Capture:
COTI's value capture model is designed to grow with adoption. Here's how it works:

Standard transactions on COTI are fast and ultra low cost. That's by design, and it's a major incentive for builders and users to come on-chain.

But private transactions and computation require more gas, and that gas is burned, permanently reducing supply. Two forces compound at once:
- Private transactions cost more gas per tx
- That gas is burned, shrinking supply and increasing the value of each gas unit over time

On top of that, new products like the Privacy Portal have their own usage-based fees, and those fees are also burned.

As COTI scales across multiple chains and partner ecosystems, every private computation and cross-chain transaction generates real revenue. All paid in $COTI. All feeding the burn. More adoption. More usage. More burns. Less supply. That's the flywheel.

On COTI GC Performance
At COTI, we agree that showing is better than telling. COTI is actively working on publishing privacy benchmarks and research on speed and cost of private assets, transactions and computation. This will demonstrate COTI GC performance against other privacy protocols in the space.

In the meantime, we encourage all users right now to use and access the network and compare it to other networks to experience first-hand the costs and speed. It’s very notable.

On COTI Community Engagement
COTI is always working to grow and create real, authentic engagement across the community. Our average posts on average actually exceed many other privacy projects in the space on a regular basis, with high-quality engagement from real users and all of this is verifiable.

One thing that makes COTI unique is that we’re constantly shipping new products, features and ecosystem updates. As a result, social reach and engagement can be sometimes affected due to the sheer number of regular announcements and updates.

We do openly generate visual assets with AI using the latest tools, which can lead to them receiving the "Made with AI” tag. Using AI allows us to scale our marketing and growth efforts and accomplish more with the same amount of people. Building with AI is essential for all projects and team members.

On Public Dashboards
This is a great request. COTI will publish easy to use dashboards which track on-chain metrics, traction and create more transparency into the data for the community.

In the meantime, you can track on-chain details here: https://t.co/2duDX6HNXP

Early this year, we published our plans for 2026, of which we’re still on track to ship this year all of the product developments we’ve outlined and mentioned: https://t.co/EpXs12CkD1

AMA & Additional Updates
The COTI Team will address your additional questions in a future Community AMA.

We appreciate your patience and are always committed to community transparency, and appreciate everyone’s support. Stay COTI

[Shahaf Bar-Geffen @shahafbg]

Useful list.
One category missing: Garbled Circuits.

FHE encrypts data. ZK proves computation. GC encrypts the computation itself. 3,000x faster than FHE on equivalent workloads. Light enough to run on a phone.

@COTInetwork built gcEVM around it.