PANews reported on October 31 that according to CoinDesk, the Bitcoin rollup project Citrea announced the completion of a $14 million Series A financing round, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, with participation from angel investors such as Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan. Citrea aims to use zero-knowledge (ZK) technology to transform Bitcoin into a programmable asset, introducing smart contract functions similar to Ethereum.

Citrea uses the BitVM computing model to make it compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing applications on Ethereum to be deployed on Citrea without modification. Citrea said that Bitcoin lacks scalability solutions in the DeFi field and may gradually be marginalized if its practicality is not enhanced. Through ZK technology, Citrea expands the capacity of Bitcoin's block space, providing a foundation for it to support a variety of on-chain applications and avoiding the impact on Bitcoin's position in decentralized finance.