NextBlock has invested $3 million in the seed round of Soda Labs, providing all the funds for this completed financing round. As this blockchain infrastructure company expands its programmable privacy technology for public chain financial activities, this investment has also been put into effect.
On the occasion of this investment, Soda Labs is transitioning from its current gcEVM privacy layer to Soda Bubble. The latter is a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to enable private computations between different blockchain networks.
Soda Labs indicates that the company has been developing a cryptographic privacy solution based on obfuscation circuits and multi-party computing (GC-MPC) for the past two and a half years.
The company stated that its system uses mature encryption standards such as AES and SHA256, and can run on the standard cloud CPU without the need for dedicated hardware.
NextBlock Founder and General Partner Pieter van Poecke said, "What attracted us to invest in Soda is not only the underlying cryptography, but also the practicality of this technology in what we consider to be the most important blockchain financial workloads."
van Poecke added that Soda already has operational products and paying customers, and its technical intellectual property, founding team, and commercial capabilities have laid the foundation for the next stage of development.
Soda Labs Expanding Privacy Infrastructure
The technology of Soda has processed over 100 million transactions on the COTI network. Its deployed applications include the tokenization platform Zoniqx and the perpetual contract exchange PriveX.
According to the company, the trading volume of PriveX has exceeded $20 billion, while Zoniqx is promoting the integration of issuers across multiple asset classes and judicial jurisdictions.
Soda The existing gcEVM privacy layer is still running on COTI. The company is currently expanding its architecture through Soda Bubble, which is designed to handle developer-defined workloads from different blockchains, while not exposing private data to the public or to Soda Labs itself.
Bubble Validator Network Allows participants to mathematically verify whether calculations involving private data have been correctly executed.
Soda Labs is set to expand Bubble to the main EVM ecosystem, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Base. The company is also advancing its expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana.
The company's goal is to promote the adoption of... in business.
This new financing will provide Soda Labs with the space to expand commercial adoption and implementation over the next 12 to 18 months.
The company plans to use this funds for market entry strategies, expansion of the validator network, broader blockchain coverage, team expansion, as well as integration with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms, and other financial infrastructure providers.
Soda Labs is still advancing several undisclosed pilot projects with multiple financial and infrastructure institutions, with the goal of transforming them into formal production deployments.
The company is expected to announce the updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks. Soda indicates that their latest tests on Arbitrum have measured the complete transaction lifecycle on the mainnet, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus, and settlement.
The company stated that compared to the previous benchmark, the new results have improved by 5 to 10 times, but they have not yet been publicly released. Soda also mentioned that their GC-MPC architecture can provide a throughput about 10 to 100 times higher than current available alternatives, as well as transaction costs that are 100 to 1000 times lower.
Soda Labs, Co-Founder and CEO, and Avishay Yanai stated: "Public blockchains already possess liquidity, users, and financial applications. What they lack is a way to allow regulated funds to flow without everyone having to see everything about it."
Yanai says that the design goal of Bubble is to provide these institutions with privacy and controlled disclosure capabilities while they continue to use the blockchain networks that banks, payment companies, and tokenization platforms have already come to rely on.
