Blockchain investment firm NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs’ seed funding round as the privacy infrastructure developer prepares to expand its technology across multiple blockchain ecosystems.
Soda Labs is moving beyond its existing gcEVM privacy layer on COTI with Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to run programmable computations without exposing sensitive data publicly or to Soda Labs. The company says Bubble is intended to support workloads across hundreds of blockchain networks.
From COTI deployment to broader blockchain support
Soda Labs has spent the past two and a half years developing a privacy system based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation, or GC-MPC. Its technology uses established cryptographic standards including AES and SHA256 and is designed to operate on standard cloud CPUs rather than specialized hardware.
The company says its infrastructure has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network. Applications using the technology include tokenization platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX. According to Soda Labs, PriveX has handled more than $20 billion in trading volume, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.
The gcEVM privacy layer remains live on COTI. Soda Labs is now extending its work through the Bubble Validator Network, where participants can mathematically verify that computations involving private data were completed correctly.
Bubble is being expanded to major EVM ecosystems, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. Soda Labs also plans to support non-EVM networks, including Solana.
Funding to support commercial rollout
Soda Labs plans to use the new capital over the next 12 to 18 months to scale its go-to-market operations, expand the validator network, increase blockchain coverage, grow its team and develop 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 that it hopes to convert into production deployments.
Soda Labs said recent testing on Arbitrum measured the full transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement. The company reported a five- to tenfold improvement over its previous benchmark, although the updated results have not yet been publicly released.
It also claims that its GC-MPC architecture can deliver approximately 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs than available alternatives. Soda Labs said it plans to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks.
NextBlock founder and general partner Pieter van Poecke said the investment was driven by Soda Labs’ working product, paying customers and focus on financial workloads. Soda Labs CEO and co-founder Avishay Yanai said the company aims to give banks, payment providers and tokenization platforms privacy and controlled disclosure while allowing them to use existing blockchain networks.
