NextBlock invests $3 million in Soda Labs blockchain privacy startup

Soda Labs, which builds privacy infrastructure for institutions, banks and DeFi applications, has secured $3 million from Luxembourg-based venture capital firm NextBlock to scale its programmable privacy infrastructure across public blockchains, according to an Oct. 8 statement.

Soda Labs is focused on bringing more privacy to public blockchains without giving up their transparency and programmability. The company develops confidential-computing technology for banks, institutions, DeFi platforms and real-world asset applications.

Its Bubble platform allows users to conduct transactions, manage treasuries, make payments and execute smart contracts without publicly revealing balances, transaction amounts, counterparties or trading strategies, the company says.

The technology is powered by garbled-circuit Multi-Party Computation and is already running in production on COTI’s mainnet. The system can run on standard cloud CPUs, allowing private computation without requiring specialized hardware or separating applications from public blockchain infrastructure.

“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. “Soda already had a working product and paying customers. We believe its differentiated technical IP, deeply technical founding team and strong commercial instincts give the company a compelling foundation for its next phase.”

Soda Labs says its infrastructure has processed more than 100 million transactions, while its work has also extended to institutional experiments through the European Central Bank’s Pioneer programme.

The tokenization platform is onboarding issuers across multiple markets and asset classes, while PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume.

Soda Labs is using the round to scale commercial adoption and expand its privacy architecture from gcEVM, its Ethereum layer 2 privacy layer on COTI, to Soda Bubble. Bubble is expanding across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, while Soda Labs is also developing support for networks such as Solana.

“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,” Avishay Yanai, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda Labs, stated. “Bubble gives banks, payment companies and tokenization platforms privacy with controlled disclosure, on the chains they already use. This round lets us take it from pilots to production.”

The company says new tests conducted on Arbitrum measured encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement across the full transaction lifecycle and showed a five- to 10-fold improvement over its previous benchmark. The updated results have not yet been published. Soda Labs also says its architecture can offer 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower costs per transaction than existing alternatives.

Soda Labs plans to use the funding to expand its validator network and blockchain coverage, grow its team and pursue integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms and other financial infrastructure providers. It is also working on several undisclosed pilots with financial and infrastructure organizations, with the goal of turning those projects into production deployments.