Citrea, Bitcoin Rollup Project, Raises $14 Million

Citrea aims to transform the Bitcoin blockchain into a platform for smart contracts using ZK technology, thereby turning BTC into a programmable asset.

Citrea, a Bitcoin project that aims to expand the utility of the largest cryptocurrency through Zero-Knowledge (ZK) technology, has successfully raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.

The round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with participation from Maven 11, Mirana Ventures, dao5, ZKV, and a host of angel investors including Erik Voorhees (Co-founder and CEO of ShapeShift), Joe and Nikil (Co-founders of Alchemy), Mustafa AI-Bassam (Co-founder of Celestia).

Citrea raised a $2.7 million seed round led by Galaxy in February, using the BitVM computation model designed to enable the deployment of Ethereum-like smart contracts on the Bitcoin network.

Orkun Mahir Kılıç, CEO of the project's developer Chainway Labs, said that Citrea is an EVM-compatible layer, meaning that any application on Ethereum can simply be deployed on Citrea without having to change anything.

Citrea aims to turn the Bitcoin blockchain into a platform for deploying smart contracts, turning Bitcoin (BTC) into a programmable asset through the use of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.

According to the Citrea team, expanding Bitcoin's utility is "extremely important." While BTC has performed well as a “digital gold,” it is now at risk of being “sidelined” due to its reliance on external intermediaries and networks to provide scalability. As a result, Bitcoin is being undermined by the lack of suitable scaling solutions, which hampers BTC’s role in the DeFi space, leading to the risk of losing relevance in DeFi and becoming obsolete.

The use of intermediaries to extend BTC’s utility is being explored by Bitcoin layer-2 projects BOB, which aim to create bridges to other networks such as Ethereum to perform finalized transactions on Bitcoin.