NextBlock Funds Soda Labs’ $3 Million Seed Round

NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs, funding the blockchain privacy startup’s entire seed round to expand technology designed to enable confidential computing on public blockchains. Soda Labs is developing infrastructure for financial applications to process sensitive information without making the underlying data public. The company says its system combines garbled circuits with multiparty computation, a cryptographic approach it calls GCMPC, and runs on standard cloud CPUs rather than specialized hardware. The technology is intended to let applications handle private data while remaining connected to public blockchain networks. Soda Labs says that could support financial activity for which balances, transaction details or other information cannot be openly disclosed. The funding is intended to help the company expand its validator network and blockchain coverage, grow its team, pursue integrations and advance institutional pilots toward production. Soda Labs says its technology has processed more than 100 million transactions on COTI, where it supports applications including tokenization platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX.