Citrea, a Bitcoin project striving to expand the utility of the original cryptocurrency by using zero-knowledge technology, said it raised $14 million in Series A funding.
The investment was led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and included contributions from angel investors Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Thursday.
Citrea, which raised $2.7 million of seed funding in a Galaxy-led round in February, uses the BitVM computing paradigm that is designed to allow Ethereum-style smart contracts on Bitcoin.
"Citrea is an EVM-compatible layer, meaning all the applications on Ethereum can simply deploy on Citrea without having to change anything," Orkun Mahir Kılıç, CEO of Citrea builder Chainway Labs, told CoinDesk in an interview last month.
The project aims to transform the Bitcoin blockchain into a venue for smart contracts by making bitcoin (BTC) a programmable asset through the use of zero-knowledge (ZK) technology.
ZK technology allows data to be transferred securely between parties through the ability to demonstrate knowledge without actually revealing the data and without the prover and verifier interacting.
"Citrea enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with ZK technology and enables the Bitcoin network to support diverse on-chain applications and platforms," Citrea said.
The goal of allowing greater utility is one of "critical" importance, according to Citrea. While BTC has served well as a form of digital gold, it risks being sidelined by users relying on intermediaries and external networks to provide scalability, Citrea said.
Bitcoin is therefore being undermined by the absence of a "proper scalability solution," hindering its role in decentralized finance (DeFi), which means it "risks losing its relevance in DeFi and becoming obsolete as a network."
The use of intermediaries to expand Bitcoin's utility is being explored by projects like layer-2 BOB, which aims to create bridges to other networks like Ethereum for the execution of transactions that are ultimately anchored on Bitcoin.
Read More: Leading Bitcoin Layer 2 Picks Optimism's Red-Hot Superchain to Link to Ethereum
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