NextBlock Leads $3M Seed Round in Soda Labs to Scale Privacy Infrastructure for Public Blockchains
Luxembourg, Luxembourg, October 8th, 2026, Chainwire
NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs’s seed round, funding the company’s entire closed round as it expands its programmable privacy infrastructure for financial activity on public blockchains.
Over the past two and a half years, Soda Labs has developed a cryptographic privacy solution combining garbled circuits with multiparty computation (GC-MPC). It relies on standard, battle-tested cryptography such as AES and SHA256. Its privacy engine runs on ordinary cloud CPUs with no specialized hardware, enabling private computation while applications stay connected to existing public blockchain infrastructure.
Soda’s technology has already processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network, where it supports deployed 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.
“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.”
The capital gives Soda Labs the room to focus over the next 12 to 18 months on scaling commercial adoption and execution.
The investment comes as Soda Labs extends its architecture from gcEVM, its Ethereum Layer 2 privacy layer that remains live on COTI, to Soda Bubble: a chain-agnostic coprocessor for programmable privacy. Bubble is designed to process developer-defined workloads originating from different blockchains without exposing the underlying private data publicly or to Soda Labs itself.
The Bubble Validator Network enables participants to mathematically verify that computations involving private data have been performed faithfully. Soda Labs is expanding the network as Bubble goes live across major EVM ecosystems, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. Expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana, is also underway.
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 complete transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement, rather than the cryptographic operation in isolation.
The company reports that the results represent a five- to tenfold improvement over its previously published benchmark. Soda Labs also reports that its garbled-circuit MPC architecture can deliver approximately 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower cost per transaction than currently available alternatives, while operating on standard cloud CPUs. The new benchmark results have not yet been publicly released.
The new capital will support Soda Labs’ go-to-market strategy, the 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 is also working with financial and infrastructure organizations on several undisclosed pilots, with the objective of converting them into production deployments.
“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.”
About NextBlock
NextBlock is a Luxembourg-based, thesis-driven venture capital firm investing at the intersection of blockchain and programmable cryptography. The firm backs companies building foundational infrastructure for privacy-preserving computation, encrypted systems and institutional digital finance, with investments spanning technologies such as multiparty computation, garbled circuits, fully homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge systems and post-quantum cryptography. NextBlock invests globally in technical teams translating advances in cryptography and computer science into commercially deployable infrastructure and applications.
About Soda Labs
Soda Labs builds confidentiality infrastructure for real-world onchain finance. Its Bubble privacy layer uses garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC) to enable private transactions and computation across public blockchains while supporting selective disclosure and compliance requirements. Bubble is live across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI, with additional networks planned. Soda Labs’ technology is designed for financial use cases including payments and stablecoins, institutional DeFi, tokenization, asset management and banking infrastructure. The company was founded by Avishay Yanai (CEO), PhD in cryptography, and Meital Levy (CTO), PhD in algorithms, who together bring more than 20 years of experience in security.