Citrea raises $2.7 million in seed funding

Chainway Labs went public earlier in February with the news that it was building the first zero-knowledge rollup for Bitcoin, called Citrea

Zero-knowledge rollups are now coming to Bitcoin.

Chainway Labs went public earlier in February with the news that it was building the first zero-knowledge rollup for Bitcoin, called Citrea. On Wednesday, the company disclosed to CoinDesk that it had raised $2.7 million in a seed fundraising round led by Galaxy Ventures.

The round saw participation from other investors including Delphi Ventures; Eric Wall, co-founder of the Taproot Wizards NFT project; and Anurag Arjun, co-founder of data availability blockchain Avail.

Traditionally, Bitcoin developers have focused on keeping the network simple, limiting core protocol upgrades to stay away from over-complicating the chain and drifting from its core use case of P2P transactions. That has changed over the last year with BitVM and Ordinals inscriptions, which are technologies that help layer 2 platforms use the Bitcoin blockchain to handle a wider array of use-cases, such as NFTs and programmable smart contracts.

With Citrea, Chainway is working to help Bitcoin better accommodate DeFi, non-fungible tokens and other use cases that were earlier only possible on smart contract-based blockchains such as Ethereum, but are now possible for Bitcoin to handle.

Citrea is “the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero- knowledge technology,” Chainway Labs noted in a statement shared with CoinDesk.

Zero-knowledge cryptography permits fast, private and secure data transfer between parties, and it is closely associated with recent attempts to scale the Ethereum blockchain via rollups. Rollups are “layer 2” networks that operate along with a blockchain, bundle up transactions, and then settle them on the base chain, typically with enhanced transaction speeds and lesser fees for end-users.

Citrea’s zero-knowledge rollup will be based on the EVM, meaning developers should be able to port over applications that they have built for Ethereum and other compatible networks.

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