Introduction

Soda Labs has emerged from stealth with $3 million in seed funding to address a critical gap for institutions entering the public blockchain ecosystem. As stablecoin circulation surpasses $322 billion and tokenized real-world assets exceed $26 billion, the default transparency of public ledgers has become a barrier for banks, payment processors, and asset managers accustomed to private trading desks.

What Happened

The company announced a seed round led by NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm specializing in programmable cryptography, to build infrastructure that lets regulated money move privately on public chains. Unlike traditional finance where trading details are hidden from competitors, public blockchains broadcast every transaction by default, exposing sizes, timing, and counterparties to all observers including bots that profit from front-running.

Why This Matters

More than $1.7 billion in maximal extractable value has been extracted from users between 2022 and 2025 due to this transparency gap. Soda's solution enables financial institutions to access liquidity and user bases without revealing their positions, a capability that could unlock trillions in onchain capital currently held back by privacy concerns. The demand for onchain privacy is already evident: privacy-token market capitalization rose about fivefold to $30 billion in the year to September 2026, while the share of Zcash supply held in shielded pools climbed from roughly 9 percent to 28 percent.

Key Takeaways

  • Soda Labs raised $3 million from NextBlock, a venture firm focused on multiparty computation, garbled circuits, fully homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge systems, and post-quantum cryptography.
  • The founding team, led by CEO Avishay Yanai (PhD in cryptography) and CTO Meital Levy (PhD in algorithms), brings over 20 years of combined experience in security and algorithmics.
  • Soda's Bubble network is live on Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and COTI, with expansion to Solana, Optimism, BSC, Avalanche, and XDC planned through the COTI central-bank digital euro pilot.
  • PriveX, Soda's privacy-focused perpetuals exchange, grew from about $13 million in cumulative volume three weeks after its June 2025 launch to more than $20 billion by October 2026, a roughly 1,500x increase.
  • Benchmark results from July 2026 show 500 confidential transactions per second sustained at $0.14 per million transfers, with new tests promising five- to tenfold improvements over earlier performance.

Conclusion

With fresh funding and a technically differentiated approach, Soda Labs is positioned to bridge the gap between public blockchain liquidity and institutional confidentiality. The next milestones, publishing updated benchmarks and converting unnamed pilots into named production deployments will determine whether regulated capital can safely flow onto public chains at scale.