A short explainer for readers who want to understand what NextBlock's $3 million investment in Soda Labs is, why blockchain privacy infrastructure matters, and what changes it could bring for developers, exchanges, and financial users.

What is the Soda Labs investment?

NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs’ seed round, funding the entire closed round. Soda Labs is a blockchain infrastructure company expanding programmable privacy technology for financial activity on public blockchains. The deal is not only a funding announcement; it marks a shift from Soda Labs’ existing gcEVM privacy layer toward Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor designed to enable private computation across different blockchain networks.

Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock, said: "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." Van Poecke added that Soda already had a working product and paying customers, while its technical intellectual property, technical founding team and commercial capabilities provided a foundation for its next phase.

Why does privacy matter on public blockchains?

Public blockchains are transparent by design. That helps verification, but it can also expose patterns, balances, order flow, or other data that financial systems may want to keep confidential. Soda Labs has spent the past two and a half years developing a cryptographic privacy solution based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation, known as GC-MPC.

The company said its system uses established cryptographic standards including AES and SHA256 and can operate on standard cloud CPUs without requiring specialised hardware. For newcomers, that means the privacy layer is not built around one unusual machine type; it is meant to run on more common cloud infrastructure while keeping selected computation private.

What has Soda Labs already processed?

Soda’s technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network. Its deployed applications include tokenisation platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX. According to the company, PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.

Soda’s existing gcEVM privacy layer remains live on COTI. That gives the company a base in one network, while its new architecture is aimed at broader blockchain coverage.

What is Soda Bubble?

Soda Bubble is described as a chain-agnostic coprocessor. In plain terms, it is a helper system that can process developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without exposing private data publicly or to Soda Labs itself. The goal is to let applications run confidential computation while still connecting to multiple blockchain networks.

The Bubble Validator Network allows participants to mathematically verify that computations involving private data have been performed correctly. This matters because privacy cannot simply mean "trust the operator." The system is designed to provide checks that the hidden computation was done properly.

Soda Labs is expanding Bubble across major EVM ecosystems, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base. It is also working on expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana.

What will the $3 million be used for?

The new funding will give Soda Labs room to focus on scaling commercial adoption and execution over the next 12 to 18 months. The company plans to use the capital for its go-to-market strategy, validator network expansion, broader blockchain coverage, team growth and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenisation platforms and other financial infrastructure providers.

Soda Labs is also working with financial and infrastructure organisations on several undisclosed pilots, with the aim of converting them into production deployments. In other words, the company is not only building technology; it is trying to move pilots into real commercial use.

What does Soda Labs report about performance?

The company expects to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks. Soda said its latest testing on Arbitrum measured the complete transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement.

The company reported a five- to tenfold improvement over its previous benchmark, although the new results have not yet been publicly released. Soda also said its GC-MPC architecture can provide approximately 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 10,000 times lower latency than existing privacy solutions. Until the benchmarks are published, readers should treat these performance claims as company-reported figures.

What does this mean for users and developers?

For developers, the investment and Soda Bubble roadmap suggest a focus on privacy tools that can work across several chains, not only one network. For financial users, the practical question is whether private computation can become easier to integrate into exchanges, tokenisation platforms, payment systems, and other financial infrastructure.

The next measurable milestones are the public performance benchmarks and the conversion of undisclosed pilots into production deployments. For newcomers, the key takeaway is simple: NextBlock's $3 million seed investment funds Soda Labs as it expands privacy infrastructure across major blockchains, scales adoption, validators, and financial integrations.