Citrea Raises $2.7M for Bitcoin ZK-Rollup Launch

Citrea a project implementing zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups for Bitcoin, recently secured a $2.7 million seed round led by Galaxy Ventures.

Galaxy Ventures, Galaxy Digital’s venture capital division, led the $2.7 million seed round for Citrea a project implementing zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups for Bitcoin.

Chainway Labs, the blockchain infrastructure company developing Citrea will use the funds to launch the product, as announced in a blog post on February 2. Citrea is the first rollout that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology, making it possible to build everything on Bitcoin, the company stated in a statement.

Participating in the round that concluded in 2023 were Igor Barinov, the founder of Blockscout Eric Wall, co-founder of Taproot Wizards and Delphi Ventures.ZK-rollups are ideas that are more frequently associated with Ethereum via layer-2 blockchains, such as zkSync and Polygon.

ZK-rollups try to be more useful and cheaper by combining transactions on layer 2 and protecting them with a cryptographic method called ZK-proofs to show they happened on the underlying blockchain without showing how they happened.

In addition, Bitcoin features layer 2s like the payments-focused Lightning Network and scalability initiatives like ZKSats and Rollux, which compete with Citrea. Citrea stated in its post that its ZK-rollup allows “diverse applications without changing its consensus rules” and solves Bitcoin’s “challenges in handling more transactions.

Citrea also stated that it is using Bitcoin as a base layer for securing and settling transactions, in addition to using it as a digital currency. There is considerable disagreement among bitcoin developers over the best use case for the blockchain. As outlined in its white paper, some people advocate for its continued use as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

However, new initiatives like Ordinals, which permit assets similar to nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the BRC-20 standard, which permits speculative tokens have called into question that notion.

Citrea announced on February 6 its goal to integrate Bitcoin “as a base layer” into an ecosystem of blockchain games, NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi) while maintaining Bitcoin security and preserving its consensus rules. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which “enables all the EVM developers to build on Bitcoin,” is also the foundation of its solution.