Citrea, a mission aiming to deliver zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups to Bitcoin, has closed a $2.7 million seed spherical led by Galaxy Ventures, the enterprise arm of Galaxy Digital.
The mission stated in a Feb. 2 weblog post that the funding would allow Chainway Labs, the blockchain infrastructure agency constructing Citrea, to deliver it to market.
“Citrea is the primary rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge expertise, making it potential to construct all the pieces on Bitcoin,” the agency stated in a press release.
The spherical closed in 2023 and noticed participation from Delphi Ventures, Taproot Wizards co-founder Eric Wall, Blockscout founder Igor Barinov and others.
2/6 Citrea is the primary rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge expertise.
Citrea’s mission is to construct a programmable liquidity layer on prime of essentially the most safe and decentralized blockchain, Bitcoin.
— Citrea (@citrea_xyz) February 21, 2024
ZK-rollups are ideas which were extra generally linked to Ethereum via layer-2 blockchains similar to Polygon and zkSync.
ZK-rollups purpose to be environment friendly and cheaper by bundling transactions on layer 2 and securing them utilizing a cryptographic protocol known as ZK-proofs to show they occurred to the bottom blockchain with out disclosing particulars about how.
Bitcoin additionally has layer 2s, such because the payments-focused Lightning Community and scaling initiatives to rival Citrea, similar to ZKSats and Rollux.
In its publish, Citrea claimed its ZK-rollup addresses Bitcoin’s “challenges in dealing with extra transactions” and helps “numerous purposes with out altering its consensus guidelines.”
“In doing so, Citrea leverages Bitcoin not solely as a digital forex but in addition as a base layer for securing and settling transactions,” it added.
Associated: BTC price drops to 1-week low as traders focus on Bitcoin whales, Nvidia
Bitcoin builders have seen a growing divide on how the blockchain ought to be used.
Some imagine it should retain its use as a peer-to-peer digital money as described in its white paper, however latest initiatives like Ordinals, permitting for nonfungible token (NFT)-like property and the BRC-20 commonplace permitting for speculative tokens, have challenged that thinking.
In a Feb. 6 weblog post Citrea stated it goals to make Bitcoin “a base layer” for an ecosystem of blockchain video games, NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi) “with out compromising Bitcoin safety and altering its consensus guidelines.”
Its answer can be based mostly on the Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM), which “allows all of the EVM builders to construct on Bitcoin.”
Large Questions: What did Satoshi Nakamoto think about ZK-proofs?
