Soda Labs, a privacy infrastructure developer for banks, institutions and DeFi applications, has secured a $3 million investment from Luxembourg-based venture capital firm NextBlock, according to an Oct. 8 statement. The company will use the round to scale its programmable privacy infrastructure across public blockchains and move institutional pilots into production deployments.

Soda Labs builds confidential-computing technology aimed at financial institutions that need transaction privacy on public chains without sacrificing transparency or programmability. Its Bubble platform lets users conduct transactions, manage treasuries, make payments and execute smart contracts without publicly revealing balances, transaction amounts, counterparties or trading strategies.

What does the technology actually run on?

The system is powered by garbled-circuit Multi-Party Computation and already runs in production on COTI's mainnet. Because the computation runs on standard cloud CPUs, it does not require specialized hardware or separate infrastructure away from public blockchains — a practical consideration for regulated institutions that must integrate with existing financial rails.

The company says its infrastructure has processed more than 100 million transactions. Its work has also reached institutional experiments through the European Central Bank's Pioneer programme. A tokenization platform built on the stack is onboarding issuers across multiple markets and asset classes, while PriveX, another deployment, has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume.

Soda Labs is expanding Bubble across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, and developing support for additional networks such as Solana. The architecture grew out of gcEVM, its Ethereum layer-2 privacy layer on COTI.

Why did NextBlock write the check?

Pieter van Poecke, founder and general partner of NextBlock, said the firm was drawn as much by commercial readiness as by cryptography: "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. 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."

Avishay Yanai, co-founder and CEO of Soda Labs, framed the gap the company is targeting in market-structure terms: "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. 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."

What are the performance claims?

Soda Labs says new tests conducted on Arbitrum — measuring encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement across the full transaction lifecycle — showed a five- to 10-fold improvement over its previous benchmark. The updated results have not yet been published. The company also claims its architecture can deliver 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower costs per transaction than existing alternatives. These are vendor figures and remain unverified by third parties.

The funding will go toward:

• Expanding the validator network and blockchain coverage
• Growing the team
• Pursuing integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms and other financial infrastructure providers

Soda Labs is also running several undisclosed pilots with financial and infrastructure organizations, with the stated goal of converting those projects into production deployments — the near-term milestone that will determine whether institutional privacy infrastructure graduates from central-bank experiments to regulated money moving on public chains at scale.