Soda Labs raises $3m seed for on-chain privacy

Soda Labs has raised $3 million in a seed that NextBlock funded alone, and the useful fact is the order of disclosure, not the size. The October 8, 2026 Chainwire release, datelined Luxembourg, says NextBlock invested $3 million and financed the company's entire closed round for programmable privacy on public blockchains. Soda Labs' NextBlock case study, stamped August 16, 2026, already named that investor and stated no amount. The company blog, fetched on October 10, has no funding post.

CoinJournal repeated the $3 million figure and the entire-round wording the same day. Crypto Briefing called NextBlock Luxembourg-based, matching nextblock.vc, which lists 33 Rue de Puits Romain, L-8070 Bertrange. The wire's headline says NextBlock "leads." The body names no second investor. Soda Labs describes the system as garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC), using AES and SHA-256 on ordinary cloud CPUs. On sodalabs.xyz the product is Bubble, confidential transactions with an on-chain access list for a scoped disclosure.

What is already in production

The deployment Soda Labs can point to is COTI. An August 12, 2026 post bylined to Co-Founder and Chief Executive Avishay Yanai says GC-MPC has been COTI's privacy layer since the March 2025 mainnet and has processed more than 125 million confidential transactions. The October 8 release uses a rounder line, "more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network," and says tokenisation platform Zoniqx is onboarding issuers while perpetuals venue PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume. The release attaches no independent audit of those claims. Soda Labs also cites a Chainlink Labs pilot on private bridge limits, a pilot in the European Central Bank Pioneer programme, and a Hacken audit of the stack.

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Aave Arc tried a permissioned pool and was left holding $57,000. MUFG's Japanese government bond repo test uses Canton. U.S. Bank's USBDC went live on Stellar with issuer clawback, a freeze, not encryption. Soda Labs wants the settlement on a public chain and the inputs hidden. Its FAQ, read on October 10, says Bubble is live on COTI, Ethereum (ETH), Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, not yet on Solana (SOL). The October 8 release calls the validator set an expansion onto those chains and gives no count. The older gcEVM, its Ethereum Layer 2 privacy layer, stays on COTI, and the release says Bubble does not reveal private data to the public or to Soda Labs.

A published 500, and an unpublished multiple

"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, in the October 8 release. "Soda already had a working product and paying customers."

Avishay Yanai, co-founder and chief executive of Soda Labs, said: "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." The release puts the $3 million toward 12 to 18 months of selling, validators, hiring and bank integrations, plus pilots it does not name. Bitcoinist called the sum small beside the largest infrastructure raises.

The about page lists Yanai, a Bar-Ilan cryptography PhD with five years on enterprise multiparty computation at VMware, and Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Meital Levy, a Tel Aviv algorithms PhD. The July 2026 Arbitrum run in the August post is: 15,000 confidential ERC-20 transfers, 500 sustained and 750 at the peak, at a compute cost of $0.14 per million transfers, from encryption through settlement. The post says the chain, not the cryptography, bound the result at 500. The release claims a later, unpublished test is a five- to tenfold improvement, with about 10 to 100 times the throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower cost than current alternatives. A gain of that size, end to end, would be a settlement result. Until the file is public, the number is 500.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) review covered here in July 2026 put Travel Rule implementation at 83% as stablecoins became the focus. Privacy that cannot show a supervisor a scoped transfer fails a bank review, and Soda Labs says the access list is that path. The release names no signed bank. If the Arbitrum file appears in the coming weeks, 500 can be set beside the claimed step-up. If it does not, the multiple is marketing, and what remains is a $3 million sole-investor seed plus a COTI record the company states itself.

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