Chainway Labs' Citrea Secures $2.7M to Integrate Zero-Knowledge Rollups into Bitcoin
Summary:
Chainway Labs is developing a project called Citrea to introduce zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups to Bitcoin. Citrea recently secured $2.7 million in a seed funding round led by Galaxy Ventures. The project is expected to boost Bitcoin's block space capabilities with ZK technology. The funding will facilitate bringing Citrea to market and help transform Bitcoin into a base layer of blockchain games, NFTs, and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem without changing Bitcoin's core security and consensus rules.
The blockchain infrastructure company, Chainway Labs, is developing the project Citrea, which is focussed on integrating zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups into Bitcoin. The project recently secured a funding of $2.7 million in a seed round orchestrated by Galaxy Ventures, the investment branch of Galaxy Digital. Chainway Labs articulated in a blog post dated February 2 that the raised amount will vastly help in launching Citrea in the market. Citrea is anticipated as the pioneer rollup that boosts Bitcoin block space's performance incorporating zero-knowledge technology. Other investors in the fundraising round included Delphi Ventures, Taproot Wizards co-founder Eric Wall, Blockscout's founder Igor Barinov, among others.
ZK-rollups, that demonstrate efficiency and cost-effectiveness by aggregating transactions on layer 2 and ensuring their security employing a cryptographic protocol known as ZK-proofs, have been typically associated with Ethereum through layer-2 blockchains like Polygon and zkSync. Bitcoin also uses layer-2 networks, such as the payment-centric Lightning Network, and rival scaling ventures like ZKSats and Rollux. Citrea, in a statement, argued that its ZK-rollup confronts the issue Bitcoin faces in processing additional transactions and aids in unveiling varied applications without altering its consensus rules. So, Citrea uses Bitcoin not just as a digital currency, but it also leverages it as a root layer for verifying and settling transactions.
The Bitcoin developer community is recently experiencing a debate about the role of Bitcoin. Some developers argue that Bitcoin should continue to serve as a peer-to-peer virtual cash medium as proposed in its inaugural paper, while recent projects like Ordinals, which enable nonfungible token-like assets, and the BRC-20 standard allowing for speculative tokens, have questioned this notion. Citrea, in its blog post on February 6, stated its goal to transform Bitcoin into a base layer for a blockchain games, NFTs, and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem without hampering Bitcoin's security and altering its consensus norms. Interestingly, Citrea's solution is powered by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing all EVM developers to construct on Bitcoin.
Published At
2/22/2024 6:59:37 AM
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