NextBlock invests $3M in Soda Labs to expand blockchain privacy

Banks, payment firms, and other users of public-blockchain financial rails are the main group affected, because Soda Labs is positioning its tools around regulated money and private transaction details. Tomorrow morning, the relevant change is that a funded privacy project is pushing its infrastructure across major blockchains rather than staying as a narrower seed-stage effort.

In practice, what changes is the set of privacy functions Soda Labs is building: it is describing support for private balances, amounts, and counterparties, and it is also naming garbled circuits and multiparty computation as part of the system. What does not change is that the work still targets public blockchains, so the basic setting remains on-chain even as more confidential data is meant to be handled there. (per bitcoinist.com)

Still unknown is how far the rollout will reach and how much adoption the company will see over the next 12 to 18 months. The open question is whether its planned expansion across public blockchains turns into use by banks, payment firms, and validators, and what would settle that is actual deployment on those networks and disclosed integrations.