Soda Labs has received a $3 million seed investment from NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture capital firm specializing in cryptographic infrastructure. The funding aims to accelerate Soda Labs’ efforts to develop secure blockchain infrastructure designed for banks and payment firms seeking to transfer regulated funds while safeguarding sensitive details, including transaction amounts and counterparties.
NextBlock commits $3 million, plans for commercial rollout
The entire $3 million seed round was provided by NextBlock, positioning Soda Labs to transition from pilot programs to full-scale production within the next 12 to 18 months. Soda Labs was founded by CEO Avishay Yanai, who described the investment as an inflection point that will enable the company to move from research and pilots to broader commercial adoption.
Pieter van Poecke, NextBlock’s founder and general partner, explained that the firm was motivated by Soda Labs’ existing base of paying customers and the technical expertise of its founding team. He cited the team’s intellectual property and commercial focus as key reasons for NextBlock’s decision to exclusively fund the round.
Soda already had a working product and a paying customer base, while the new capital will accelerate delivery from pilots to market-ready solutions, according to Pieter van Poecke.
NextBlock previously launched its first Luxembourg alternative investment fund in July 2025 with $40 million in initial commitments, targeting projects at the intersection of finance and cryptographic technology.
Soda Bubble privacy network and technical details
With the new funding, Soda Labs will focus on shifting operations from its previous gcEVM platform to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to process private workloads across several blockchains. Soda Bubble allows sensitive data to remain confidential even from Soda Labs itself, and facilitates verification via the Bubble Validator Network.
Currently, Soda Bubble is active on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon, with plans to expand to non-EVM networks such as Solana in the future.
The confidentiality technology underpinning Soda Bubble is based on garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC), which enables calculations to occur directly on encrypted data. This method splits encrypted information across independent nodes, preventing any single operator from viewing the complete data set. The solution runs on standard cloud CPUs and employs widely recognized cryptographic protocols such as AES and SHA256.
Mini dictionary: Garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC) is a cryptographic protocol allowing several parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private, often used to enhance privacy and security in blockchain and financial technologies.
Unlike full anonymity solutions, Bubble offers confidentiality: transactions—including sender, receiver, amount, and token type—are not publicly visible, but authorized parties can decrypt the records if needed.
Performance metrics and audit status
Soda Labs claims a five- to tenfold improvement in transaction handling compared to its previous test cycles, and plans to release updated benchmarks soon. Public figures currently available report that Soda Bubble can support 500 confidential transactions per second on Arbitrum, handling over 15,000 transfers in July 2026, with an associated cost of $0.14 per million transfers.
| Network | Transactions Per Second (TPS) | Total Transfers (July 2026) | Cost per Million Transfers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum | 500 | 15,000 | $0.14 |
The firm states that its technology stack is regularly audited by blockchain security company Hacken and is backed by three granted US patents.
Soda Labs’ ecosystem and sector context
Soda Labs’ technology has been operational since March 2025, where it supports privacy functionality for COTI’s mainnet. The company was the inaugural recipient of COTI’s $25 million ecosystem fund in 2024.
In September 2026, investment firm 21Shares described privacy as “the missing layer between blockchains and institutions” and highlighted ongoing efforts in the sector to address this infrastructure gap.
Other recent developments in blockchain privacy include Tether’s launch of USDT as a confidential token on Zama, leveraging fully homomorphic encryption, and the debut of EthSystems in July 2026. EthSystems, started by former Ethereum Foundation researchers, is developing privacy-focused infrastructure for banks and regulated payment providers.
Mini dictionary: EthSystems is a technology company spearheaded by researchers formerly with the Ethereum Foundation, focused on building privacy and compliance solutions for institutional blockchain use.
Bubble provides confidentiality for assets moved on public blockchains, ensuring transaction details remain hidden from the public while authorized parties retain access in compliance scenarios.
