NextBlock leads Soda Labs' $3M seed round to scale privacy infrastructure for public blockchains

On October 8, 2026, Soda Labs announced a $3 million seed round, fully funded by NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm. NextBlock invested the entire closed round. It is NextBlock's first lead investment.

NextBlock's thesis is that institutions should be able to use the major public blockchains, where the liquidity, users and infrastructure already exist, without making every transaction, balance and commercial relationship public. That matters most for stablecoins and payments. It is the problem Soda Labs was built to solve.

"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."

What we've built

Over the past two and a half years, Soda Labs has developed a cryptographic privacy solution that combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation (GC-MPC). It relies on standard, battle-tested cryptography such as AES and SHA256, and it runs on ordinary cloud CPUs with no specialized hardware. Applications stay connected to the public blockchain infrastructure they already use.

Our technology has already processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network. There it supports deployed applications including the tokenization platform Zoniqx and the perpetuals exchange PriveX. PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume, and Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.

From gcEVM to Bubble

We are extending our architecture from gcEVM, our Ethereum Layer 2 privacy layer that remains live on COTI, to Soda Bubble: a chain-agnostic coprocessor for programmable privacy. Bubble processes developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without exposing the underlying private data publicly, or to Soda Labs itself.

The Bubble Validator Network lets participants mathematically verify that computations involving private data were performed faithfully. We are 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 underway.

We expect to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks. Our latest testing ran 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.

What the round funds

The capital gives us room to focus, over the next 12 to 18 months, on scaling commercial adoption and execution. It supports our go-to-market, the expansion of the validator network and blockchain coverage, team growth, and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms and other financial infrastructure providers. We are also working with financial and infrastructure organizations on several undisclosed pilots, with the goal of turning 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."

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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.