Citrea, which aims to develop Bitcoin’s capacity for commerce without ‘decentralising or compromising the security of Bitcoin’, has raised their $14 million (about IDR 220 billion) Series A funding round. The round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with participation from Erik Voorhees, Balaji Srinivasan, and other prominent angel investors and venture capitalists.
Launched on Sunday, 3 November, 2024, Citrea announced an invitation-only developer programme entitled ‘Citrea Origins’. The programme gathers select developers to build applications on Citrea that increase the utility of Bitcoin. Global mainstream adoption has cemented Bitcoin’s place as ‘digital gold’. However, many of Bitcoin’s fundamental absurdist values would be undermined by scalability solutions that could unlock broader financial utility. This is another gap in Bitcoin’s existence that forces users into a passive holding of Bitcoin as digital gold, or to continue to use custodians for broader utility, enabling Bitcoin’s diminished role in Permissionless Finance.
Citrea solves these issues because it is the first scalable Bitcoin technology that also preserves the fundamental principles of Bitcoin. Using zero-knowledge technology, Citrea increases the capacity of Bitcoin’s blockspace and allows more applications (and different types of on-chain applications) to be built with the network. It also brings back users’ active engagement with Bitcoin, enabling them to purchase, use, lever, borrow and lend BTC tokens, thus transforming BTC from a passive store of value to an active financial tool.
Source: Liputan 6
