The $2.7 million seed round for Citrea, a project that seeks to implement zero-knowledge rollups, or ZK-rollups, on Bitcoin, was led by Galaxy Ventures, Galaxy Digital’s venture capital division. In a blog post published on February 2, the project stated that the money would allow Chainway Labs, the blockchain infrastructure company that is developing Citrea, to launch the product.
The company released a statement saying, “Citrea is the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology, making it possible to build everything on Bitcoin.” 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 by means of layer-2 blockchains, like zkSync and Polygon.
By combining transactions on layer 2s and securing them with a cryptographic technique known as ZK-proofs to demonstrate they occurred to the base blockchain without having to reveal the specifics of the transactions, ZK-rollups seek to be more effective and less expensive.
Layer 2s of Bitcoin include the Lightning Network, which is mostly focused on payments, and scalability initiatives like Rollux and ZKSats that 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.”
Opinions among Bitcoin developers regarding the best use of the blockchain vary.
Some people still think it should be used as peer-to-peer electronic cash, as it is defined in its white paper; however, new initiatives like Ordinals, which permits assets similar to nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and the BRC-20 standard, which permits speculative tokens, have called into question that notion.
Citrea stated in a blog post dated February 6th that it wants to integrate Bitcoin “as a base layer” into an ecosystem that includes decentralized finance, blockchain gaming, and NFTs “without compromising Bitcoin security and changing its consensus rules.”
The Ethereum Virtual Machine, which “enables all the EVM developers to build on Bitcoin,” is also the foundation of its solution.
