Venture firm NextBlock has completely funded a $3 million seed round for Soda Labs to accelerate the expansion of its programmable privacy technology across public networks.
Key Takeaways
- NextBlock provided the entire $3 million seed funding for Soda Labs.
- Soda Labs' technology has processed over 100 million transactions on the COTI network.
- Perpetuals exchange PriveX has handled more than $20 billion in volume using Soda's infrastructure.
- The rollout targets expansion across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and Solana.
Expanding Programmable Privacy with Soda Bubble
Soda Labs spent two and a half years developing a cryptographic privacy solution grounded in garbled circuits and multiparty computation (GC-MPC). Running on standard cloud CPUs without specialized hardware, the system uses standard cryptographic algorithms like AES and SHA256. The startup is transitioning from its live gcEVM privacy layer on COTI to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor that allows developers to run private computations across multiple blockchains.
"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's stack already powers real-world deployments, including tokenisation platform Zoniqx and decentralized derivatives exchange PriveX, which has executed over $20 billion in trading volume. Computations are verified using the Bubble Validator Network without exposing underlying sensitive private data to the public or to Soda Labs itself.
Performance Benchmarks and Institutional Adoption
The $3 million injection gives Soda Labs a 12 to 18 month runway to expand its team, validator network, and commercial go-to-market strategy. The company is running pilots with banks, tokenisation platforms, and payment providers. Recent testing on the Arbitrum live network evaluated complete transaction lifecycles—encryption, MPC computation, consensus, and settlement—showing a 5- to 10-fold speed improvement over previous benchmarks. Soda Labs claims its GC-MPC design delivers 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction fees than competing solutions.
"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," stated Avishay Yanai, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda Labs.
Why It Matters
Institutional adoption of public blockchains has faced persistent friction due to the completely transparent nature of standard distributed ledgers. By building privacy mechanisms on standard CPUs via garbled circuits, infrastructure like Soda Bubble enables regulated institutions to settle transactions without leaking confidential business details. If these cryptographic performance claims hold in production, cross-chain privacy coprocessors could unlock substantial enterprise capital flows into public decentralized finance ecosystems.
