NextBlock Invests $3M in Soda Labs to Bring Privacy to Public Blockchains
Soda Labs’ GC-MPC system allows banks and payment companies to compute on private data without leaving public blockchains. NextBlock, a Luxembourg venture firm, funded the entire seed round.
October 8, 2026 - 1:00 pm
Pieter van Poecke, founder and general partner of NextBlock
Credit: NextBlock
NextBlock is investing $3 million to support an important challenge for public blockchains: providing financial institutions with privacy while keeping them on public networks.
The firm has backed Soda Labs’ entire seed round, funding its programmable privacy infrastructure for financial activity on public blockchains.
Soda Labs has spent two and a half years developing its privacy system, combining garbled circuits with multiparty computation (GC-MPC). The technology relies on established cryptography like AES and SHA256 and runs on standard cloud CPUs.
The goal is to enable private computation while keeping applications connected to existing public blockchain infrastructure. This addresses a key issue for banks, payment companies, and other financial institutions. While public blockchains offer benefits like liquidity and user access, financial data must often remain confidential.
“What attracted us to Soda was not only its underlying cryptography but also the practicality of the technology for the financial workloads that will matter most onchain,” said Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock. “Soda already had a working product and paying customers. We believe its differentiated technical IP, highly skilled founding team, and strong commercial instincts provide a solid foundation for its next phase.”
Soda’s technology has processed over 100 million transactions on the COTI network, supporting applications like tokenization platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX, which has handled more than $20 billion in trading volume. Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across various asset classes and jurisdictions.
Extending Privacy to More Blockchains
Soda is now expanding its architecture beyond gcEVM, its Ethereum Layer 2 privacy layer still active on COTI. The next step is Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor for programmable privacy.
Bubble is designed to process developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without exposing private data publicly or to Soda Labs itself.
The company is expanding to major EVM ecosystems like Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Base, and is also working on integration with non-EVM networks such as Solana.
Its Bubble Validator Network enables participants to verify that computations involving private data are performed correctly.
For NextBlock, this investment reflects a focus on infrastructure that can make privacy-preserving computation practical for real financial applications, keeping this activity within existing public blockchain ecosystems.
Making Privacy Faster and Cheaper
Soda Labs plans to publish updated performance benchmarks in the coming weeks, based on testing conducted on Arbitrum, showcasing the complete transaction lifecycle, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus, and settlement.