Brad Goodwin graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in Economics before joining PwC as a Management Consultant. He later moved to Adobe, working in its Global Strategic Business function, while also becoming an active community member of the COTI Network. Brad officially joined COTI as a Business Development Manager in March 2025, where he now partners with Web3 projects to embed programmable privacy.
What first drew you to the COTI ecosystem?
When I first came across COTI in 2020–2021, they were tackling problems that hadn’t yet been solved — the blockchain trilemma in particular. They showed serious technical acumen in harmonising speed, cost, and security, and built an L1 specifically optimised for payments.
What really resonated with me was their insistence on pursuing things others hadn’t yet done, like pioneering DAG-based consensus and exploring algorithmic stablecoins before they were mainstream.
My time at Adobe focused on global B2C strategy; optimising go-to-market, building enablement, and driving digital experience.
At COTI, I’m applying that background to make us more effective operationally, through things like systems implementation and process optimisation.
How did your experience as a community member shape your perspective before and after joining the team?
From the outside, as a community member, you always hope the team is on the verge of becoming an “overnight success” — the kind that’s years in the making.
When I joined and saw what was happening under the hood, it exceeded those expectations.
We’re working with nation-scale organisations like the Bank of Israel, the European Central Bank, and initiatives like Saudi Arabia’s AI Blockchain Center. That kind of validation gives me a lot more confidence in the long-term mission.
And on a personal level, many people from the COTI community are now genuine friends.
Privacy-on-Demand is central to COTI V2. How does it work for developers building on EVM or non-EVM chains?
We created a privacy solution using garbled circuits that lets any application tap into COTI’s privacy layer without needing to rebuild or move their tech stack.
How does the developer experience compare to other privacy solutions like ZK or FHE?
Garbled circuits don’t require specialist knowledge or different programming languages, and they deliver consistent high performance without the overhead of ZK or FHE.
Can you share an example of a use case this enables that wasn’t possible before?
One big example is federated learning.
Hospitals can train on combined datasets without revealing raw data to each other.
Is it easy for developers to start working with?
Yes. There have been over 60 partners onboarded in the last three months, and if you’re familiar with Solidity or EVM, it feels very similar.
How does the cost compare to other privacy tools?
It’s extremely low-cost — around $0.00061 per transaction. And it stays consistent even as complexity increases.
COTI recently joined the European Central Bank’s Digital Euro pilot. What’s your involvement there, and what kinds of privacy-preserving features are being tested?
We’re involved in three main ways.
First, we’re acting as a pioneer partner, helping test the robustness of the APIs that support the settlement layer of the digital euro.
Second, we’re bringing in our experience from previous work with the Bank of Israel on confidential payments.
And third, we’re showcasing how consumer applications can use our garbled circuits to interact with the settlement platform in a privacy-preserving way.
Can you give an example of a potential consumer-facing use case?
Unfortunately, I can’t go into specific examples right now because those tests are ongoing.
But it’s something we’re very excited about and see as a major opportunity.
In a regulated environment, how do you strike a balance between privacy and compliance?
For us, it’s about drawing a clear line between privacy and anonymity.
Anonymity, where neither sender nor receiver is visible, tends to raise compliance concerns.
Privacy, on the other hand, is about limiting which transaction details are visible.
With our data privacy framework, users can selectively permit access to information — like sharing transaction data with an exchange or regulator when necessary — while keeping other details private.
That’s a much more sustainable model in regulated environments.
You’ve partnered with StaTwig to help track medical supply chains, including vaccine distributions. How does your tech keep sensor data private while still enabling real-time alerts?
StaTwig uses IoT-enabled devices inside refrigerated vaccine shipments to monitor conditions like temperature, humidity, and unauthorised access.
That sensor data is encrypted before it’s transmitted, so it’s never exposed in raw form.
Our garbled circuits can compute directly over that encrypted data, allowing the system to ask key questions — for example, whether a vaccine was kept within safe temperature thresholds — without ever revealing the full data set.
The result is that only authorised parties, such as government agencies or healthcare providers, can access the final verdict on whether specific doses are usable.
What scalability considerations come into play when dealing with over 100 million doses a year?
Scalability isn’t a limiting factor for us. COTI was designed to be extremely fast and low-cost from the outset.
Garbled circuits don’t experience the same performance degradation as other privacy-preserving technologies when data complexity increases.
In fact, the communication rounds stay constant, and the performance impact becomes sublinear as data scales.
That means as StaTwig’s operations grow, the cost and speed of privacy computations remain stable, which isn’t the case with most other solutions.
What role does COTI play in improving the security of digital identity?
The scale of recent breaches, like that massive leak of 16 billion passwords, is proof that the digital identity systems of today are too fragile.
At COTI, we believe trust is too often just hope, and hope isn’t a strategy. That’s why we’re working on infrastructure that lets users retain full control over their identity.
Through our partnership with Civic, users can authenticate themselves, mint their identity as an NFT, and store it on COTI. The data remains in the user’s custody, and access is only granted to third parties with explicit permission through private keys.
Could decentralised identity eventually replace passwords altogether?
Passwords are fundamentally insecure. People reuse them, make them too simple, or just forget them.
Private keys, by contrast, are genuinely unique and much harder to compromise. For a significant portion of people, decentralised identity could absolutely remove the need for passwords.
Of course, there will always be others who prefer to outsource trust to institutions, but for those willing to manage their own credentials, this is a much safer future.
Looking ahead, do you see Privacy on Demand evolving into a universal layer for web3 privacy, similar to how TCP/IP standardised internet communication?
That’s exactly the long-term vision. We want Privacy on Demand to become the de facto standard for confidentiality in web3 — something developers across both EVM and non-EVM chains rely on without thinking twice.
It won’t be easy, but we’re already seeing momentum build. More and more teams are realising they can have high-performance privacy without specialist knowledge or heavy costs, and we’re here to keep pushing that forward.