The Good Tech Companies - Soda Labs Raises $3M From NextBlock to Let Regulated Money Move Privately on Public Chains

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/soda-labs-raises-$3m-from-nextblock-to-let-regulated-money-move-privately-on-public-chains. Soda Labs raised a $3M seed from NextBlock to scale garbled-circuit MPC privacy for banks, payments and tokenisation on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and more. Check more stories related to undefined at: https://hackernoon.com/c/undefined. You can also check exclusive content about #soda-labs, #nextblock, #technology, #web3, #good-company, #startup-funding, #fintech, #stablecoins, and more. This story was written by: @ishanpandey. Learn more about this writer by checking @ishanpandey's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Soda Labs has raised a $3 million seed round, with NextBlock, a Luxembourg venture firm focused on programmable cryptography, funding the entire round. Soda's privacy engine uses garbled circuits with multiparty computation, standard cryptography such as AES and SHA-256 and ordinary cloud CPUs with no specialised hardware. The technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the COTI network, where the PriveX perpetuals exchange has handled more than $20 billion in trading volume. Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic privacy coprocessor, is live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI, with Solana and other networks under way. Soda reports 10 to 100 times higher throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower cost per transaction than current alternatives, with new benchmarks due in the coming weeks. The capital funds 12 to 18 months of commercial scaling, validator-network expansion, hiring and integrations with banks, payment companies and tokenisation platforms.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Soda Labs raises $3 million from next block to let regulated money move privately on public chains, by Ashan Pondi. Stable coins in circulation reached a record of about $322 billion in May 26, roughly 12 times their size at the end of 2020, while the value of tokenized real-world assets such as treasuries and private credit quadrupled in a year to $26. dollars. Four billion. Every one of those dollars sits on ledgers where balances, counterparties and transaction amounts are visible to anyone who cares to look,

which is the opposite of how banks, asset managers and payment companies are used to working. Soda Labs, which builds privacy infrastructure for financial activity on public blockchains, has raised a $3 million seed round to close that gap, with the Luxembourg venture firm Next Block funding the entire round. Why public ledgers stop institutions at the door, traditional markets have always kept the details of who is trading what and in what size hidden from the rest of the market. More than half of U.S. equity volume now trades away from the public exchanges on off-exchange venues and dark pools, according to NASDAQ data cited by 21 shares, while the more than $100 trillion of U.S. securities held at DTCC sits in accounts that

competitors cannot inspect. A public blockchain reverses that arrangement, because a treasury desk moving stable coins or a fund rebalancing a tokenized portfolio broadcasts its size, timing and counterparties to every observer, including the bots that profit from front running. The same 21 shares research puts the value extracted from users through this kind of maximal extractable value, or MEV, at about $1.7 billion between 2022 and 2025. Demand for privacy on-chain is already showing up in market prices and in how holders choose to store their coins. The combined value of privacy-focused tokens rose from about $6.2 billion to about $30 billion in the year to September 2026, according to 21 shares, while the share of Zcash

supply held in its private shielded pools climbed from about 9% in September 2023 to roughly 28%. Those figures describe retail and crypto-native demand, which is a useful signal for the larger institutional market that SOTA is targeting, where the requirement is privacy that consterned. be disclosed to a regulator or auditor on request. How Garbled Circuit MPC works. Soda's approach combines two ideas that have been studied in academic cryptography for decades. Garbled circuits, first described in the 1980s to solve the so-called millionaire's problem of two people learning who is richer without revealing their wealth, let a computation run on encrypted inputs, while multi-party computation splits sensitive data across independent nodes so that

no single party ever holds the full picture. The result of the result of the result of The result is that a smart contract-john check a balance, settle a trade or apply a compliance rule without the underlying numbers ever being published on-chain or decrypted during the computation. The design choices behind the engine matter a great deal to a bank or payment company weighing it up. Soda relies on long-established standards such as a E-Sand-Shaw-256 rather than newer cryptographic assumptions, while its engine runs an ordinary cloud CPUs instead of the specialized hardware that fully homomorphic encryption and trusted execution environments often require.

Applications stay connected to the public chains they already use, while Annan Chain Access List lets authorized parties such as auditors or regulators request scoped decryption of specific data, which is the controlled disclosure that regulated institutions need. The founder thesis, Soda Labs was founded by Aveshé Yunnai, its chief executive and a PhD in cryptography, together with Midal Levy, its chief technology officer and a PhD Dyn algorithms, with more than 20 years of combined experience and security between them. The team has spent the past two and a half years building the technology, first as GCEVM, a privacy layer for Ethereum's layer two networks thought has run on the Cody Maynett since March 2025, then as soda bubble,

a chain agnostic co-processor that processes developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without exposing the private data publicly or to Soda labs itself. The company says it holds three granted U.S. patents and that its stack has been audited by Hackin. Unai's thesis rests on the view that public blockchains have already won on liquidity, users and financial applications, so the missing piece is a way for regulated money to move without showing everyone everything. In his framing, Bubble gives banks, payment companies and tokenization platforms privacy with controlled disclosure on the chains they already use, which means. they do no-thave to choose between the reach of a public network and the confidentiality their

clients expect. The new round, in his words, is what takes the product from pilots to production. A bubble validator network lets participants verify mathematically that computations involving private data were carried out faithfully, which addresses the obvious question of how anyone can trust a calculation they cannot see. Bubble is live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and Cody, expansion Tosolana and other non-EVM networks is underway, while the SOTA website lists optimism, BSC, Avalanche and XDC is next. Through COTI the technology has also reached central bank work, since Cote was named a pioneer in the European Central Bank's digital euro innovation platform and presented a pilot for confidential transactions. Traction on live networks,

SOTA's technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on the Cote network, where it supports applications including the tokenization platform Zonik and the Perpetuals exchange PriVX. PriVX launched in June 2025 with trades encrypted by default so that positions and liquidation points stay hidden, while its dashboard showed about $13 million in cumulative volume three weeks after launch. PriVX has since passed $20 billion in trading volume, roughly 1,500 times that early figure, while Zonik is onboarding issuers across several asset classes and jurisdictions.

SOTA is also working with financial and infrastructure organizations on several pilots that it has not yet named, with the aim of converting them into production deployments. The company's website separately lists a chain linkorical pilot alongside its central bank work through Cody. Performance and cost, privacy technology has long struggled with speed and cost, which is why Soda measures its system end to end rather than in isolated cryptographic steps. It's published benchmark from July 26, run on arbitrum across 15,000. confidential transfers, recorded 500 confidential transactions per second sustained and 750 at peak, at a cost of about $0.14 per million transfers. The company says its latest testing, which covers the full life cycle of encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement on the live arbitram network, shows a five to tenfold improvement on that earlier benchmark, with the results

due for publication in the coming weeks. SOTA also reports that its garbled circuit architecture can deliver roughly 10 to 100 times more throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower cost per transaction than currently available alternatives, all on standard cloud CPUs. Those comparisons are company figures until the new benchmarks are published and independently tested, although the direction is consistent with the broader argument for garbled circuits, which avoid the heavy computation that Hosh historically slowed fully homomorphic encryption. The investor thesis, next block is a Luxembourg based venture firm that invests at the intersection of blockchain and programmable cryptography, backing infrastructure for multi-party computation, garbled circuits, fully homomorphic encryption,

zero knowledge systems and post-quantum cryptography. In July 2025, it launched its first Luxembourg Alternative Investment Fund, managed by a manager licensed by the CSSF to handle virtual assets, with initial commitments of $40 million and a target of up to $60 million, which makes funding an entire seed round ad deliberate concentration rather than a syndicate allocation. Peter Van Pogue, NextBlock's founder and general partner, has said that what drew the firm to SOTA was not only the cryptography but its practicality for the financial workloads he expects to matter most on chain. His case rests on the fact that Soda already had a working product and paying customers when NextBlock invested, together with differentiated technical intellectual

property, a deeply technical founding team and strong commercial instincts, which he sees as the foundation for the company's next phase. The wider market supports that reading, since Grandview Research forecasts confidential computing to grow from $5 billion in 2023 to $153, $8 billion by 2030, while privacy specialist Zama became the first unicorn in fully homomorphic encryption with a $57 million series B in June 2025. What comes next? The capital gives soda labs room to focus over the next 12 to 18 months on commercial adoption and execution. It will fund the company's go-to-market strategy, a larger validator network, coverage of more blockchains, team growth and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenization platforms and other financial

infrastructure providers, while the most important near-term milestone is publishing the new benchmarks and turning the undisclosed pilots into named production deployments. If that happens, SOTA will have shown that institutions can use the liquidity of public blockchains without giving up the confidentiality they rely on today, which is the condition many of them have said before moving serious volume on chain. Don't forget to like and share the story, vested interest disclosure. Hacker Noon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. Hashtag D-Y-O-R. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.