NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs’ seed round, funding the company’s entire closed round as Soda Labs expands its programmable privacy infrastructure for financial activity on public blockchains.
Soda Labs said it has spent the past two and a half years developing a cryptographic privacy solution that combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation (GC-MPC).
The technology uses established cryptographic standards including AES and SHA-256 and is designed to run on standard cloud CPUs without specialized hardware.
According to the company, the privacy engine enables applications to perform private computations while remaining connected to existing public blockchain infrastructure.
while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.
“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’ technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network, where it supports applications including tokenization platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX.
PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions, according to Soda Labs.
Soda Labs said the funding will give it room to focus on scaling commercial adoption and execution over the next 12 to 18 months.
The investment comes as the company expands its privacy architecture from gcEVM, its Ethereum Layer 2 privacy layer that remains live on COTI, to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed for programmable privacy.
According to Soda Labs, Bubble can process developer-defined workloads originating from different blockchains without exposing the underlying 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, the company said.
“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.
“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.”
Soda Labs is expanding the network as Bubble rolls out across EVM ecosystems including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base.
The company is also working on expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana.
Soda Labs expects to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks.
According to the company, its latest testing was conducted on Arbitrum and measured the full transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, multiparty computation, consensus, and settlement, rather than evaluating the cryptographic operation in isolation.
Soda Labs said the results showed a five- to 10-fold improvement over its previously published benchmark.
The company also reported that its garbled-circuit MPC architecture can deliver approximately 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs than currently available alternatives, while running on standard cloud CPUs.
The latest benchmark results have not yet been publicly released.
The new funding will support Soda Labs’ go-to-market efforts, expansion of its validator network and blockchain coverage, team growth, and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms, and other financial infrastructure providers.
The company said it is also working with financial and infrastructure organizations on several undisclosed pilots, with the aim of converting them into production deployments.
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