Citrea, Bitcoin’s 1st ZK Rollup, Announces $2.7M Funding

Citrea, Bitcoin’s First ZK Rollup, Announces $2.7M Seed Funding

Citrea secures $2.7M led by Galaxy, featuring notable investors validating its mission to create a programmable liquidity layer atop Bitcoin

Hoan-My Tran

Published on Feb 22, 2024

2 min read

Citrea, Bitcoin’s First ZK Rollup, Announces $2.7M Seed Funding

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, February 21st, 2024, Chainwire

Citrea is the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero knowledge technology, enabling developers to build everything on Bitcoin.

Citrea is thrilled to announce $2.7M in seed funding, led by Galaxy, with the participation from notable investors such as Delphi Ventures, Eric Wall (Co-Founder, Taproot Wizards), Anurag Arjun (Co-Founder, Avail), BatuX (ex-Binance), Igor Barinov (Founder, Blockscout), and James Parillo (Managing Partner, Figment Capital) among others. The round was closed in late 2023. This strategic investment underscores a collective belief in Citrea’s mission to build a programmable liquidity layer on top of the most secure and decentralized blockchain, Bitcoin.

Citrea is the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology. Every transaction occurring on Citrea is fully secured by zero-knowledge proofs and optimistically verified on Bitcoin. This unique construction gives Citrea the following features;

Bitcoin as App Bedrock
Bitcoin Settlement and Trust Minimized Two-Way Peg
EVM Equivalent Execution Environment

“For the first time in the Bitcoin scalability landscape, Bitcoin serves as both a data availability and settlement layer." said Orkun Mahir Kilic, CEO of Chainway Labs, the company building Citrea. "This unique approach enables us to build an infrastructure to support a wide range of applications with full Bitcoin security."

Citrea’s journey back to 2023, starting with the ZK experiments on Bitcoin by Chainway Labs. Since then, Citrea evolved to a much larger vision of establishing Bitcoin as the foundation for the world’s finance.

"Bitcoin has largely been understood as a monetary phenomenon to date, with some exceptions in its early history. However, it is also one of the most powerful economic and computation platforms in existence. Chainway's development of the Citrea ZK Rollup should be an exciting next stage in extending the functionality of Bitcoin as a platform.” said Will Nuelle, General Partner of Galaxy’s Venture arm.

About Citrea

Citrea is the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology, making it possible to build everything on Bitcoin.

For more information, users can visit: https://citrea.xyz/

Citrea Docs: https://docs.citrea.xyz