Soda Labs raises $3M from NextBlock to put privacy under regulated on-chain money
- Soda Labs raised $3 million in a seed round funded entirely by Luxembourg venture firm NextBlock.
- The raise is meant to expand Bubble, its garbled-circuit privacy layer, from COTI onto Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and eventually Solana.
- Competitors are also racing to meet demand for rails that enable regulated money to move on public blockchains without exposing balances or counterparties.
Soda Labs disclosed earlier today that it gained a $3 million boost from NextBlock, propelling the firm in its stated mission to build infrastructure for banks and payment firms to move regulated money on public blockchains while preserving privacy on details such as balances, amounts or counterparties.
The seed round was funded entirely by NextBlock, giving the project the operating funds to pursue commercial adoption over the next 12 to 18 months.
Soda Labs’ co-founder and CEO Avishay Yanai explained the reason for this raise, saying, “This round lets us take it from pilots to production.”
Who invested in Soda Labs’ latest seed round?
Soda Labs raised $3 million in its October 2026 closed seed round, with all of those funds coming from NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm with investments in cryptographic infrastructure.
The freshly raised funds are also expected to power the shift from gcEVM to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor that processes private workloads from multiple chains without exposing the data to outside parties or to Soda itself.
Private computations can be checked on the Bubble Validator Network.
Bubble is now active on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and Polygon, while non-EVM network integration, including for Solana set for a future date.
According to NextBlock’s founder and general partner, Pieter van Poecke, “Soda already had a working product and paying customers.” van Poecke also credited the founding team’s technical IP and “strong commercial instincts” as the impetus behind the decision to go all in on Soda Labs.
NextBlock’s first Luxembourg alternative investment fund launched in July 2025, with $40 million in initial commitments.
What Soda’s privacy engine actually does
NextBlock’s backing is based on confidence that Soda Labs’ Bubble confidentiality layer, built on garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC), is ready to transition from research to revenue.
The Bubble technology performs calculations directly on encrypted data and ensures that no single operator can read the data by splitting it across independent nodes. The approach does not require any specialized chips and runs on ordinary cloud CPUs. Soda Labs also confirmed that it uses standard cryptography such as AES and SHA256.
Bubble provides confidentiality, not full anonymity. In real-life applications, information such as transaction amount, token types, senders and receivers is not publicly visible. However, an authorized party can decrypt the data.
Per Soda Labs, it has achieved a five- to tenfold improvement over its last testing of the full transaction lifecycle. It committed to publishing those updated performance numbers in the coming weeks.
The numbers currently listed on its website report 500 confidential transactions per second sustained on Arbitrum over 15,000 transfers in July 2026, at $0.14 per million transfers.
Soda Labs’ stack is audited by Hacken and covered by three granted US patents, according to the firm.
Soda Labs is expanding from COTI roots
Soda Labs’ garbled-circuit technology has been live since March 2025, powering privacy on COTI’s mainnet after becoming the first recipient of COTI’s $25 million ecosystem fund in 2024.
21Shares named privacy as “the missing layer between blockchains and institutions” in September 2026, and others have made moves to fill that void.
Tether’s USDT went live as a confidential token on Zama in 2026, using the project’s fully homomorphic encryption approach. EthSystems also launched in July 2026, led by former Ethereum Foundation researchers pitching privacy infrastructure to banks.
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FAQs
Who invested in Soda Labs and how much?
NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm focused on cryptography infrastructure, funded the entire $3 million seed round on its own, according to the company's statement.
What does Soda Labs' Bubble technology do?
Bubble uses garbled-circuit multiparty computation to run calculations on encrypted data, hiding transaction amounts, token types, senders and receivers on public blockchains while still allowing authorized parties to decrypt specific records for compliance.
Where is Soda Labs' privacy layer live today?
Soda Labs says Bubble is live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI, where its technology has processed more than 100 million confidential transactions, with expansion to Solana and other non-EVM networks underway.
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Hannah Collymore
Hannah is a writer and editor with nearly a decade of blog writing and event reporting experience in the crypto space. At Cryptopolitan, Hannah contributes to the news page, reporting and analyzing the latest developments in DeFi, RWA, crypto regulation, AI and frontier tech industries. She graduated from Arcadia university with a degree in Business Administration.
