NextBlock invests $3M in Soda Labs to expand blockchain privacy

NextBlock invests $3M in Soda Labs’ seed funding round. Soda Labs expands its privacy infrastructure across major blockchains. Soda plans to scale adoption, validators, and financial integrations.

NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs’ seed round, funding the entire closed round as the blockchain infrastructure company expands its programmable privacy technology for financial activity on public blockchains.

The investment comes as Soda Labs moves from its existing gcEVM privacy layer toward Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to enable private computation across different blockchain networks.

Soda Labs has spent the past two and a half years developing a cryptographic privacy solution based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation (GC-MPC).

The company said its system uses established cryptographic standards including AES and SHA256 and can operate on standard cloud CPUs without requiring specialised hardware.

“What attracted us to Soda was not only the underlying cryptography, but the practicality of the technology for the financial workloads we believe will matter most onchain,” said Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock.

Van Poecke added that Soda already had a working product and paying customers, while its technical intellectual property, technical founding team and commercial capabilities provided a foundation for its next phase.

Soda Labs expands privacy infrastructure

Soda’s technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network. Its deployed applications include tokenisation platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX.

According to the company, PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.

Soda’s existing gcEVM privacy layer remains live on COTI. The company is now expanding its architecture through Soda Bubble, which is designed to process developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without exposing private data publicly or to Soda Labs itself.

The Bubble Validator Network allows participants to mathematically verify that computations involving private data have been performed correctly.

Soda Labs is expanding Bubble across major EVM ecosystems, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. It is also working on expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana.

Company targets commercial adoption

The new funding will give Soda Labs room to focus on scaling commercial adoption and execution over the next 12 to 18 months.

The company plans to use the capital for its go-to-market strategy, validator network expansion, broader blockchain coverage, team growth and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenisation platforms and other financial infrastructure providers.

Soda Labs is also working with financial and infrastructure organisations on several undisclosed pilots, with the aim of converting them into production deployments.

The company expects to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks. Soda said its latest testing on Arbitrum measured the complete transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement.

The company reported a five- to tenfold improvement over its previous benchmark, although the new results have not yet been publicly released. Soda also said its GC-MPC architecture can provide approximately 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs than currently available alternatives.

“Public blockchains already have the liquidity, users and financial applications. What they lack is a way for regulated money to move without showing everyone everything,” said Avishay Yanai, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda Labs.

Yanai said Bubble is designed to provide banks, payment companies and tokenisation platforms with privacy and controlled disclosure while using the blockchain networks they already rely on.