Moving money onto a public blockchain can also put a business's financial activity on display. Payment amounts, account balances and trading activity may reveal information that companies would normally keep private.
For banks and businesses exploring stablecoins and tokenized assets, that creates a practical question: how do you use an open financial network without opening your books to everyone?
Soda Labs is building infrastructure to answer it. The company has raised $3 million in a seed round fully funded by Luxembourg-based investor NextBlock, according to an announcement shared with Blockster. The money will support commercial expansion, additional blockchain integrations and the network that verifies its private computations.
The focus is Bubble, Soda's privacy layer for financial applications across public blockchains. Its pitch is to let institutions keep using those networks while deciding who can access the sensitive information behind a transaction.
Privacy Without Leaving the Public Network
Public blockchains make activity easier to inspect. That visibility becomes more complicated when the activity belongs to a company managing customer payments, investment positions or treasury accounts.
Consider a business paying suppliers with stablecoins. It needs the payments to go through and its finance team to have the right records. It may also need to share information with an authorized reviewer. Broadcasting its payment amounts and counterparties to competitors serves a different purpose.
Bubble is designed to give applications control over that disclosure. It acts as a coprocessor—an additional computing service that handles private workloads for applications on existing blockchains.
“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.”
Avishay Yanai, co-founder and CEO of Soda Labs
According to the company, Bubble is live across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base and COTI. Expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana, is underway.
Computing With Data That Stays Private
Soda's technology combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation, or GC-MPC.
The names are technical, but the goal is straightforward: perform a calculation without exposing the private information used to produce the answer.
Garbled circuits allow computations to run using encoded inputs. Multiparty computation distributes the work across participants, so an individual participant does not need access to the complete underlying data. Soda says its architecture is designed to keep that information private from the public and from Soda Labs itself.
Its technology runs on ordinary cloud CPUs rather than requiring specialized hardware. Soda's technology documentation also describes access controls through which authorized parties can request disclosure of specific information.
The Bubble Validator Network is designed to let participants verify that computations involving private data were performed faithfully. That combination—confidential information and verifiable execution—is central to the company's financial-infrastructure pitch.
Blockster recently covered a related problem in Flare's reserve-verification system for Hex Trust's USDX. There, protected computing hardware checks private reserve information and returns a signed result. Soda takes a different technical route, using cryptographic computation distributed across participants. Both address the need to make financial information useful onchain while controlling its disclosure.
An Existing Product Behind the Funding
Soda says it has spent the past two and a half years developing its privacy technology, which has processed more than 100 million transactions on COTI.
The release names tokenization platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX among deployed applications supported by that technology. PriveX has processed more than $20 billion in trading volume, according to the announcement, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions.
Those figures measure different things: the transaction count reflects Soda's technology on COTI, while the trading volume belongs to PriveX.
For NextBlock, the investment rests partly on evidence that the technology already has commercial users.
“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.”
Pieter van Poecke, founder and general partner of NextBlock
Soda was founded by Yanai, who holds a PhD in cryptography, and CTO Meital Levy, who holds a PhD in algorithms. The company says they bring more than 20 years of combined security experience.
The Next Test Is Broader Financial Use
The $3 million gives Soda room to focus over the next 12 to 18 months on commercial adoption and execution. Planned spending includes team growth, more blockchain integrations and expansion of its validator network.
The company is also working on undisclosed pilots with financial and infrastructure organizations, with the aim of turning those projects into production deployments. The announcement does not identify those organizations or establish that the pilots have become live banking services.
Performance is another part of the pitch. Soda says its latest Arbitrum testing measured the full transaction lifecycle, including encryption, private computation, consensus and settlement. It reports a five- to tenfold improvement over its previously published benchmark and plans to release updated results in the coming weeks.
The release also claims 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs than currently available alternatives. Those are company comparisons; the new results and the detail needed to assess them have not been publicly released with the announcement.
The commercial need is becoming more concrete. As Blockster's coverage of business stablecoin payments and tokenized bond investments showed this week, blockchain products are moving closer to routine financial work. That work involves customer records, commercial relationships and investment decisions that institutions need to protect.
Soda's opportunity is to make privacy part of those everyday operations. The next measure of progress will be how many institutions move from testing the technology to relying on it for real financial activity.
Reporting by Lidia Yadlos
