Citrea Raises $14M in Series A Round
Bitcoin's First ZK Rollup
Citrea recently raised $14 million in Series A funding, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with additional backing from prominent angel investors Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan. This funding aims to drive Citrea’s mission of making Bitcoin programmable through zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, transforming it into a platform for smart contracts.
Having previously secured $2.7 million in seed funding in a Galaxy-led round earlier this year, Citrea has adopted the BitVM computing paradigm. This technology is engineered to bring Ethereum-style smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain.
“Citrea is an EVM-compatible layer, meaning all applications on Ethereum can simply deploy on Citrea without needing to make changes,” said Orkun Mahir Kılıç, CEO of Citrea builder Chainway Labs, in a recent interview with CoinDesk.
Bitcoin risks becoming “obsolete”
Citrea’s core objective is to enable Bitcoin to support smart contracts and other decentralized applications by using ZK technology, which ensures secure data transfer without exposing the actual data. This innovation allows Bitcoin to function as a programmable asset, empowering it to support a broad range of on-chain applications.
“Citrea enhances Bitcoin’s blockspace with ZK technology, opening the network to diverse applications and platforms,” the company stated. While Bitcoin has long held the role of “digital gold,” Citrea believes it risks losing relevance if it continues to rely on intermediaries and external networks for scalability.
Bitcoin’s lack of a “proper scalability solution” has limited its potential in decentralized finance (DeFi). Citrea argues that without greater on-chain utility, Bitcoin could risk obsolescence as users seek alternatives for DeFi applications.
