NextBlock Invests $3 Million in Soda Labs to Enhance Blockchain Privacy Solutions

Soda Labs, a company specializing in privacy infrastructure for institutions and decentralized finance (DeFi), has announced a $3 million investment from Luxembourg-based venture capital firm NextBlock. This funding will be utilized to scale its programmable privacy technology across various public blockchains.

According to an Oct. 8 statement, Soda Labs aims to enhance privacy on public blockchains while maintaining their transparency and programmability. The company has developed a confidential-computing technology that caters to banks, institutions, and DeFi platforms. Its flagship product, the Bubble platform, enables users to conduct transactions, manage treasuries, and execute smart contracts without disclosing sensitive information such as balances or transaction amounts.

The technology behind Soda Labs is based on garbled-circuit Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and is already operational on the COTI mainnet. The system can function on standard cloud CPUs, eliminating the need for specialized hardware.

Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock, expressed confidence in Soda Labs, highlighting its working product and existing customer base. He noted that the company’s unique technical intellectual property and strong founding team provide a solid foundation for future growth.

Soda Labs has processed over 100 million transactions and is involved in institutional projects, including collaborations with the European Central Bank. The company is transitioning from its existing gcEVM privacy layer to the more versatile Soda Bubble, which aims to facilitate private computations across multiple blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Base, with plans to support Solana as well.

Avishay Yanai, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda Labs, emphasized the necessity for regulated financial transactions to occur without public exposure. He stated that the new funding will help the company move from pilot projects to full production deployments, expanding its validator network and blockchain coverage while integrating with various financial service providers.

Soda Labs also reported significant improvements in transaction processing capabilities, claiming its architecture can achieve 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower costs compared to existing solutions.