NextBlock Funds Soda Labs’ $3 Million Privacy Seed Round

Luxembourg venture firm NextBlock provided the entire $3 million seed round for Soda Labs, funding the company’s plans to expand privacy infrastructure for financial applications on public blockchains.

Soda Labs plans to use the capital over the next 12 to 18 months to develop Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor that lets developers run confidential workloads across multiple blockchain networks.

The system combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation, known as GC-MPC. Soda Labs says it runs on standard cloud CPUs without specialized hardware, potentially allowing financial applications to limit public access to sensitive transaction data while using existing blockchain networks.

Soda Labs describes Bubble as live across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI, with Solana expansion underway. The planned system is intended to let validators verify confidential computations without seeing all of the underlying information.

The capital is earmarked for sales, validator expansion, new network integrations, hiring and institutional partnerships. The company is developing pilots with financial and infrastructure groups that it expects could progress to production.

The company reports more than 100 million transactions processed through its technology on COTI. Its reported users include Zoniqx and PriveX, a perpetuals exchange that the company says has handled over $20 billion in volume.

“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, said.

Soda Labs says recent testing on Arbitrum produced a five- to 10-fold improvement over its previous benchmark. The company also claims 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs than available alternatives.

“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,” Pieter van Poecke, founder and general partner of NextBlock, said.