LayerZero integrates with TACEO Merces to enable private cross-chain token transfers

Cross-chain transfers have gotten fast. They’ve gotten cheap. What they haven’t gotten is private. LayerZero and TACEO are trying to fix that last part. The two projects have integrated TACEO’s Merces privacy layer with LayerZero’s cross-chain messaging infrastructure, enabling token transfers across blockchains that shield both participant identities and transfer amounts. The integration coincides with Merces’ mainnet launch on Monad and World Chain on September 24, 2026. What Merces actually does The core mechanic is deceptively simple in concept: Merces wraps standard ERC-20 tokens, like USDC, into private virtual accounts using a technique called secret sharing. The balances exist on-chain, but no single party can read the plaintext data. Under the hood, the system relies on multi-party computation, or MPC. This is a cryptographic approach where multiple parties jointly compute a function over their inputs without revealing those inputs to each other. In practical terms, it means Merces can process transactions while keeping the underlying financial details confidential. State changes get verified on-chain through what TACEO calls CoSNARKs technology, a framework for generating...