An Interview with Joshua Maddox, Chief Ecosystem and Partnerships Officer at COTI | Bitcoinist.com

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure The COTI Network has been making waves. They were recently selected to join the Tokenized Asset Coalition (TAC). Their recently announced COTI V2, an EVM-compatible Layer 2 (L2) on Ethereum, focuses on providing privacy-preserving solutions for decentralized applications (dApps), confidential transactions, machine learning, decentralized identification, and more. COTI V2 utilizes garbled circuits as a core technology to enhance privacy and enable secure multi-party computation.

Recently, we asked their Chief Ecosystem and Partnerships Officer, Joshua Maddox, about blockchain privacy, its importance, and COTI’s role.

1. Can you start by introducing yourself and your role as Chief Ecosystem and Partnerships Officer at COTI, and give us a brief overview of COTI’s mission in the blockchain space?

A: I’m Joshua Maddox. I’ve worked in marketing, strategy, and software engineering. I couldn’t decide whether to be a marketer or an engineer, so I sort of did both, which led me to ecosystems. I lead APAC and MENA for Tokenized Asset Coalition, am an Advisor to Provenance Blockchain Foundation, and Chief Ecosystem & Partnerships Officer at COTI, where I help advancements in tokenization, compliant privacy, and regulated financial services. I’ve orchestrated $100+ million in grant programs across the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems, and secured $10+ million in grants for projects under my leadership. In roles in developer relations, marketing, and engineering, I’ve supported collaborations with global leaders like JP Morgan, Unilever, Barclays, IKEA Foundation, IBM/Lenovo, Acumen Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. My focus is on bridging cutting-edge technology with global impact, which has enabled me to scale projects reaching hundreds of thousands of users across 190+ countries.

At COTI, we’re focused on being the privacy layer of web3. In a sentence, we’ve enabled compliant privacy at speed and cost efficiency on a public blockchain for the first time. The longer answer is leveraging a breakthrough in Garbled Circuits: you can decide not only who, in a given transaction, can have access rights to differing slices of data, but also who can run operations on top of that while it stays encrypted

2. Given security issues such as the recent leak of 16 billion passwords and growing concerns about AI exploiting personal data, how do you see blockchain technology, particularly privacy infrastructure, addressing these vulnerabilities?

A: I think people just don’t understand why privacy is so critical. The truth is, a lot of people aren’t interested in privacy until, well… they’re forced to care. For example, when breaches happen, like the one you mentioned.

Where blockchain technology and privacy infrastructure more broadly start to come in is when builders and developers can begin enabling privacy features for users before they realize they need them. That’s the real value of privacy tech.

By decentralizing certain types of data and ensuring compliance where possible—especially by making sure no single person has access to the keys that allow decryption or access—you reduce single points of failure. And single points of failure or social engineering, etc, are often the cause of some of these types of data leaks.

There’s no silver bullet. Web3 alone won’t solve everything. But we’re offering people a new set of tools—at speed and cost efficiency for the first time—that allow them to meaningfully address some of these core issues. We’ve seen interest in this in and out of web3 for very obvious reasons

3. Blockchain privacy company Zama recently raised $57 million in a Series B round, achieving a valuation over $1 billion. What does this funding round signal about the maturing of privacy solutions in the crypto industry, and how does COTI position itself in this landscape?

A: Zama’s raise is proof, lest it were needed, that privacy isn’t a fringe feature anymore but a billion-dollar imperative. It signals investor confidence in privacy tech that is rapidly maturing from experimental to enterprise-ready, especially with encryption implementations that enable computations on encrypted data. The industry is waking up to privacy as the missing link for mass adoption, particularly given the increasing sophistication of cyber threats.

If 2025 is shaping up to be the year of stablecoin growth, 2026 has a strong chance of being the year when privacy goes mainstream – not least in the field of stablecoins, where privacy-preserving solutions are now actively being developed

COTI has been a clear leader in the space. We’re live on mainnet with Garbled Circuits, delivering privacy for our first builders. This is live today, and we’ve already brought on multiple partnerships that integrate COTI’s core technology into real-world apps, making us the go-to for compliant, user-friendly on-chain privacy at speed and cost efficiency.

4. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently published a piece emphasizing the critical importance of privacy technology in blockchain. How does his perspective align with COTI’s approach to privacy, and what key takeaways from his article align most closely with your work?

A: Vitalik’s “Why I Support Privacy” piece resonates deeply with us all at COTI: it’s a clear call for privacy as the bedrock of web3. It’s hard to dispute his thesis that concentrated information equals concentrated power, and that without privacy, blockchains risk becoming surveillance tools rather than liberators. This is largely in line with our mindset. We prioritize privacy-preserving tech to ensure developers and their users retain control and avoid the pitfalls of centralized data silos while still being able to work with regulators, institutions, and the broader promises of Web3

5. Privacy infrastructure is clearly evolving from a niche concern to a mainstream necessity. What factors do you believe are driving this shift, and how is COTI contributing to making private digital finance accessible to everyday users?**

A: I think privacy has always been an underlying concern when people need it. The issue is that most people don’t realize they need it until it’s too late.

What’s really driving the current shift—what feels like a new “privacy summer” as we head into 2026—is the global climate. Around the world, there’s a growing sense of instability. Governments don’t seem to be getting more democratic. They’re not protecting their citizens in the ways many of us would hope. At the same time, large institutions and companies are failing to uphold the social contracts we assume they’ve made—especially when it comes to protecting our data.

When you decentralize data—so it can’t be controlled by a single entity or actor—and ensure that privacy works in a way both developers and users expect it to, you shift power back into the hands of people. And more people are starting to realize that privacy is essential in their lives. I think that realization will only continue to grow as we see larger hacks, more data leaks, and increasing global conflict.

COTI is really contributing to making private global finance more accessible to everyday users by enabling developers and institutions to access compliant privacy—at both speed and cost efficiency—for the first time. That means people can begin building products and services on a public blockchain that actually meet the laws in their own countries, even within a rapidly shifting regulatory landscape.

If we want builders to offer privacy to users, they have to be able to do it in a way that’s compliant with the demands of their geography. COTI puts that power into developers’ hands—both by providing a simple, EVM-standard development experience and by delivering the speed, cost-efficiency, and compliance needed to make private digital finance viable.

6. Unlike many privacy projects still in development, COTI’s technology is already live and operational. Can you explain the core innovations, such as garbled circuits, that enable this, and how they provide a scalable solution for privacy on public blockchains?

A: Yeah, that’s right. We’re live, operational, and already have builders coming on and leveraging the core technology.

What makes Garbled Circuits really powerful is, first, that we’re significantly faster and lighter than the nearest privacy tech. In our latest benchmarking, we were 3,000 times faster and 250 times lighter than the closest competitor.

What that means is that Garbled Circuits allow you to do compliant privacy at speed and cost efficiency for the first time. With COTI’s data privacy framework, developers can assign different users different access rights to specific slices of data. In a given transaction, each participant gets access to only the data they need. At the same time, operations can be performed on top of encrypted data, which is essentially a superpower.

So, imagine Bank A, Bank B, Customer A, Customer B, and a regulatory authority all involved in a transaction. Developers and their users can permission each party to access, or run operations on, only the data relevant to them—nothing more. That’s the kind of granular, scalable control Garbled Circuits make possible.

We also offer something called Privacy on Demand, which means you don’t have to choose between building on COTI or another blockchain. You can keep your app or dApp on another chain already connected to COTI, and simply use COTI as your privacy layer. Or, if your use case calls for it, you can build directly on COTI.

Bottom line: we’re faster, lighter, offer more developer flexibility—and we’re already live and being battle-tested..

7. In light of big privacy stories like data breaches and regulatory scrutiny, how does COTI’s “compliant privacy” model balance user protection with the need for transparency and regulatory compliance?

A: Compliant privacy means you’re able to give each individual user in a transaction access to only the specific slices of data they need. It allows for very granular control—down to exactly who gets access to which pieces of data, and even who can run functions on top of that data while it remains encrypted.

By putting that level of control in the developer’s hands, they can create user experiences that offer both strong data protection and support for regulatory compliance. Developers and users can work together to decide which parts of the data should remain private and which should be shared with third parties, like regulators.

This model empowers developers to pass that same control on to users—so both sides can fine-tune how privacy and compliance are handled, based on the specific jurisdiction and laws involved.

8. What role do you envision privacy infrastructure playing in enhancing a) Blockchain-based systems and b) Off-chain systems that currently have no blockchain component?

A: With COTI’s Privacy-on-Demand features, we can enhance virtually any other blockchain by giving it this new “garbled circuits” privacy superpower that COTI offers.

For off-chain systems, it’s really about identifying where intermediaries currently sit. We believe that blockchain is fundamentally good at one thing: replacing trust with truth. You shouldn’t have to trust a party—you should be able to verify. That’s the core value blockchain brings.

So when you look at systems with intermediaries—places where trust is required—you can start identifying which segments should move on-chain. In the past, many of those couldn’t be dislodged because of regulatory or compliance limitations. But now, with COTI, you can bring off-chain systems on-chain in a decentralized, trustless way—while still remaining compliant.

This opens up possibilities not just for DeFi or things like private on-chain trading strategies for copy trading but also a broad range of use cases in more traditional sectors like actively managed funds or supply chain management, anywhere privacy plus verifiability matters. With privacy infrastructure like COTI’s, you can remove intermediaries while still meeting compliance standards, enabling trustless systems to fulfill the roles those intermediaries once played.

9. What are the primary features that differentiate COTI’s privacy tech from other methods like zero-knowledge proofs or fully homomorphic encryption, especially in terms of speed, usability, and real-world applications?

A: ZK and FHE are really important technologies that have opened up a lot of doors for interesting use cases. Garbled Circuits, in a way, combine the best of both worlds but with speed and cost efficiency that far exceed what either of those have traditionally offered.

Our last benchmarking showed COTI’s tech to be roughly 3,000 times faster and 250 times lighter than the nearest privacy tech competitor, at least on-chain.

ZK proofs are great for verification, but they’re quite binary in nature. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), on the other hand, allows for computations to happen on top of encrypted data but it tends to be quite heavy and expensive, making it impractical for many real-world applications, at least traditionally

Garbled Circuits take things a step further by enabling both: you get the ability to generate proofs and to perform computations on encrypted data at a level of speed and efficiency that allows it to run on almost any device.

While all of these privacy technologies are valuable—and we absolutely support and cheer on the broader privacy ecosystem—we believe Garbled Circuits stand out by delivering some of the best aspects of ZK and FHE in one streamlined, affordable package.

10. Why does privacy matter in the context of AI agents, and how does this align with the need for agents to ideally be interoperable and capable of collaboration?

A: I think privacy, combined with trustless systems, opens up a lot of doors for emerging technologies. In the context of AI, I don’t think anyone fully understands yet what AI agents will be capable of, especially as their intelligence, access to tools, compute, and data grow on a weekly basis. What we do know is they’ll have the authority to take actions on our behalf, which introduces serious security and data risks, which we’re already beginning to see.

When you can make data private, allow computations on top of it, and do it all in a trustless way, you suddenly unlock the ability for AI agents to interact with sensitive data in a far more secure and robust manner, one that respects user privacy.

It enables agents to operate independently while still maintaining a needed balance between privacy, compliance, transparency, and compliance. That’s essential for interoperability and collaboration between agents across systems and domains.

It’s not yet clear in which area of agentic behavior privacy will matter “most,” but as their capabilities grow, we’re going to see it become increasingly critical.

11. Do you see the blockchain industry eventually coalescing around a single dominant privacy technology, or do you believe it is the sign of a healthy market for there to be competing privacy implementations, each with their own benefits and trade-offs?

A: No, I don’t think there’s going to be a single dominant privacy technology. In most tech sectors, we tend to see duopolies or a handful of clear leaders—maybe three or four—that sit at the top. Beneath them, you’ll always have innovators pushing the boundaries and forcing those leaders to evolve. I think privacy in blockchain will follow a similar pattern.

The world needs technologies like ZK and FHE. That said, Garbled Circuits—and COTI—are very well positioned to lead those top-tier players as the industry begins to mature.

A healthy ecosystem requires more than one implementation. It thrives on experimentation and diversity—people testing, iterating, and pushing new ideas. That includes other buildings with garbled circuits as well, which we’re already starting to see now that COTI has laid the foundation and path.

12. Finally, with AI-native builders on the rise and tokenization projected to reach trillions, how can projects such as COTI enhance these fast-growing verticals through the incorporation of privacy features?

A: Look, with tokenization and real-world assets, you simply can’t scale without privacy. Once you embed into the real world, you’re subject to strict compliance and reporting requirements. Trillions of dollars in real-world assets are not going to move onto public blockchains unless there’s a way to maintain both privacy and compliance. It has to be both.

COTI has already proven this out through the growing interest we’re seeing from real-world asset projects and the work we’ve been doing in tokenization. Privacy is going to be a core part of the real-world asset narrative—and that narrative is going to drive the dominant volume of blockchain transactions.

We’re still a few years away from true mass adoption, but what’s happened over the past year—between stablecoin growth, regulatory shifts, announcements, sandboxes, and billions (soon trillions) of dollars in assets starting to move on-chain—suggests we’re getting close to escape velocity for RWAs and tokenization.

And when that happens, privacy will be hand-in-hand with it

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