Blockchain Privacy Boosted by NextBlock Investment in Soda Labs

Expansion of Blockchain Privacy Technology

NextBlock invests $3 million in Soda Labs' seed round, funding the entire closed round as the blockchain infrastructure company expands its programmable privacy technology for financial activity on public blockchains. The investment comes as Soda Labs moves from its existing gcEVM privacy layer toward Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to enable private computation across different blockchain networks.

Background and Technology

Soda Labs has spent the past two and a half years developing a cryptographic privacy solution based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation (GC-MPC). The company's system uses established cryptographic standards including AES and SHA256 and can operate on standard cloud CPUs without requiring specialised hardware.

Practicality and Market Potential

Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock, said what attracted him to Soda was not only the underlying cryptography but the practicality of the technology for the financial workloads he believes will matter most onchain. Soda already had a working product and paying customers, while its technical intellectual property, technical founding team, and commercial capabilities provided a foundation for its next phase.

Commercial Adoption and Expansion

The new funding will give Soda Labs room to focus on scaling commercial adoption and execution over the next 12 to 18 months. The company plans to use the capital for its go-to-market strategy, validator network expansion, broader blockchain coverage, team growth, and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenisation platforms, and other financial infrastructure providers.

Performance Benchmarks and Future Plans

Soda Labs is also working with financial and infrastructure organisations on several undisclosed pilots, with the aim of converting them into production deployments. The company expects to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks. Soda's latest testing on Arbitrum measured the complete transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus, and settlement, with a five- to tenfold improvement over its previous benchmark.