Soda Labs Raises $3 Million To Bring Private Computation To Public Blockchains

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: NextBlock has invested $3 million in Soda Labs, funding the company’s entire seed round. Soda is building privacy infrastructure based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation so financial applications can process confidential data while remaining connected to public blockchains. Public blockchains are very good at proving what happened. That is also one of the reasons banks struggle to use them. Soda Labs has raised $3 million to tackle the problem from the opposite direction: keep the public blockchain, but make sensitive computation private. Luxembourg-based venture firm NextBlock funded the company’s entire seed round. Soda has spent roughly two and a half years developing a cryptographic system based on garbled circuits and multiparty computation, often shortened to GC-MPC. The idea is to let applications perform calculations on private data without exposing the underlying information to everyone watching the chain. For financial institutions, that could apply to transaction details, balances, business logic or other data that cannot simply be made public. Privacy i...