Key Points
Chainway Labs’ Citrea Secures Funding
Chainway Labs’ Bitcoin zero-knowledge rollup, Citrea, has raised $2.7 million in seed funding.
The funding round was led by Galaxy Ventures.
Other participants included Taproot Wizards co-founder Eric Wall, data availability blockchain Avail’s co-founder Anurag Arjun, and Delphi Ventures.
The Aim of Citrea
Citrea is designed to introduce zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup technology, predominantly used on the Ethereum network, to Bitcoin.
According to Citrea, the introduction of zero-knowledge technology will enhance the security of Bitcoin transactions.
Citrea claims to be the first rollup that improves Bitcoin’s capabilities with zero-knowledge technology.
Every transaction on Citrea is fully secured by zero-knowledge proofs and optimistically verified on Bitcoin.
ZK rollup is a layer-2 (L2) blockchain solution that manages storage and computation off-chain while leaving transaction data on the layer-1 (L1) network.
This solution, mainly used on the Ethereum blockchain, increases transaction throughput and reduces transaction costs.
It significantly scales the network by posting valid batches periodically, bundled from the L2, instead of posting single transactions on the L1.
Since its creation, Bitcoin has been a relatively light network, lacking the additional features found on Ethereum.
However, Citrea aims to make Bitcoin more dynamic, enabling it to accept non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and accommodate decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases.
Citrea also plans to leverage Ethereum as the ZK rollup will be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Scaling the Bitcoin Blockchain
Citrea, announced earlier this month, is the first ZK rollup on Bitcoin.
Citrea argues that Bitcoin has the most secure and censorship-resistant blockspace.
However, most scaling proposals suggest creating new block spaces that do not scale Bitcoin.
These new blockspaces do not inherit Bitcoin’s properties and may compete with the network in the long term.
Citrea also states that solutions like Lightning and sidechains have not met expectations.
While the Lightning Network does not bring programmability to Bitcoin, sidechains do not actively utilize the Bitcoin blockchain.
To scale Bitcoin blocks securely, Citrea argues, it is necessary to “shard the execution with on-chain verifiability and data”.
Easy verifiability is also only possible via ZK or fraud proofs.
However, as fraud proofs require large amounts of data written to Bitcoin, ZK proofs are the best way to verify execution validity within Bitcoin’s block size limit.
Chainway Labs plans to launch a test network in the second quarter of 2024.
