First Bitcoin Zero-Data Rollup Citrea Secures $2.7M In Seed Funding

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By Calvin S. Nelson


The primary Bitcoin zero-knowledge rollup Citrea has generated $2.7 million in its latest seed spherical. In accordance with its announcement, Galaxy led the funding spherical, with different outstanding firms as individuals.

Citrea revealed it could use zero-knowledge cryptography to boost Bitcoin’s budding on different purposes. Its actions will cowl the decentralized finance (DeFi) area and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Citrea Takes ZK-rollups to Bitcoin Blockchain

Citrea introduced the $2.7 million seed funding in a latest weblog put up. The transfer is a part of its plans to launch the ZK rollups to the Bitcoin market and the broader DeFi area.

In its assertion, the agency famous:

Citrea is the primary rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge know-how, making it attainable to construct all the things on Bitcoin.

Earlier this month, Chainway Labs, the blockchain agency behind Citrea, disclosed the launch of the primary ZK-rollup for Bitcoin. Additionally, on Wednesday, it famous that the funds would assist the mission launch available in the market. Notably, zero-knowledge rollup is a know-how centered on scaling the Ethereum blockchain.

Nevertheless, the brand new improvement is taking it to Bitcoin. Citrea ended the funding spherical in 2023, with Galaxy Ventures, the enterprise arm of Galaxy Digital, because the lead. Different individuals have been Delphi Ventures, Eric Wall (co-founder of Taproot Wizards), Igor Barinov (founding father of Blockscout), and extra.

In its assertion, Citrea promised to deal with particular notable points associated to the Bitcoin Community. These embody the community’s challenges in processing extra transactions. Additionally, the ZK rollup indicated its assist for “numerous purposes with out altering its consensus guidelines.”

Citrea plans to leverage Bitcoin’s place as a digital foreign money and a base layer. Additional, such a transfer will improve safety and velocity in finishing transactions. The idea of ZK-rollups is majorly related to Ethereum by way of layer-2 blockchains like Polygon and zkSync.

Typically, ZK-rollups intention to supply effectivity and low prices by bundling transactions on layer-2 platforms. Additionally, they safe transactions by way of a cryptographic protocol often known as ZK-proofs. These show that the transactions occurred on the base blockchain with out disclosing their particulars.

Debates On The Utilization Of Bitcoin Blockchain

Over time, Bitcoin builders have debated the utilization of the blockchain whereas asserting its supremacy. With a give attention to retaining the community easy, they restrict core protocol upgrades to forestall extra problems on the chain.

Additionally, they feared the community might deviate from peer-to-peer transactions that shaped its core utilization, as famous in Bitcoin’s white paper. Nevertheless, new tasks reminiscent of Ordinals and BitVM modified the development for Bitcoin core utilization.

These tasks facilitate the operations of layer-2 platforms on the Bitcoin blockchain, enabling programmable sensible contracts and NFTs.

Citrea is coming to Bitcoin to allow the community to accommodate DeFi purposes and NFTs. Additionally, it could activate dealing with different use instances beforehand suitable solely on sensible contract-based networks like Ethereum.

Notably, Chainway assured the safety of Citrea and full potential by way of zero-knowledge proofs.

The agency said:

Every transaction occurring on Citrea is absolutely secured by zero-knowledge proofs and optimistically verified on Bitcoin.

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