Citrea Announced Building Bitcoin’s First ZK Rollup

• "Today we introduce Citrea, the first rollup that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin blockspace with zero knowledge technology," was stated in a blog post.
• "Citrea represents a significant milestone for Bitcoin: it is the only execution layer on Bitcoin that settles on Bitcoin, the first ZK proof verification, and the first universal L2 verification inside Bitcoin."

"Citrea batches thousands of transactions, processes them in zkVM, and produces a succinct validity proof asserting the correctness of the execution as well as the output data," the announcement reads.

• "For the first time in Bitcoin history, Citrea validity proofs are inscribed and natively verified within the Bitcoin blockchain. Citrea comes with a native ZK proof verifier smart contract on Bitcoin L1, built in BitVM."
• "Unlike monolithic sidechains, Citrea creates a modular world for Bitcoin with its execution shard that keeps the settlement and data availability on-chain, on-Bitcoin."

• "Citrea creates consistent fee revenue for miners through data availability, trustlessly scales BTC beyond Bitcoin with validity proofs, and allows developers to build anything on its EVM equivalent execution shard," the introductory blog post explains.

In light of the announcement, some people expressed skepticism stating that the core technology hyped up in the announcement does not exist yet and/or is yet to be demonstrated. In response, Citrea's @0x_orkun promised to open-source everything in the following weeks.

• According to @super_testnet, one of the co-creators of BitVM, "they only have an alpha stage *ethereum* L2 (not on bitcoin), and they got an important zk function to run in bitvm, but it's only a step in the right direction."

"I do think they deserve kudos for getting groth16 to run in bitvm – that really is very meaningful progress toward a rollup – but you don't get to claim to have "the first zk rollup that settles on bitcoin" when you don't have anything of the sort,' the developer added.

• "I claim that they lied in their initial announcement and *if* they did this in order to attract investors, *that* is a scam. I can't claim they are a scam without knowing their intentions. But I do suspect it," explained @super_testnet.

"We have a very unoptimized zk verifier in BitVM and almost feature complete proof generator rollup. In the next few months we will connect the dots and release the testnet with codebase," responded Citrea's @0x_orkun.

• @super_testnet and @0x_orkun will hash it out on X space hosted by LayerTwo Labs this Friday at 5PM UTC.

What's next for Citrea

• Internal Devnet is Enabled. "We are running Citrea Devnet with a synthetic native BTC internally for critical infrastructure integrations and tests. Trust-minimized two-way peg with BitVM is under heavy development."
• "Keep an eye out for the reveal of Citrea's trust-minimized peg design. We will announce our bridge design and open-source our codebase in the coming weeks!"
• Public Testnet. "We’ve been working hard on building a robust testnet for the first rollup on Bitcoin. We’re excited to share more in the coming months."
• Our developer contact form opens today. "Citrea has been incubated by Chainway Labs for over a year, and is well-funded. If you’re interested in building with us or deploying on Citrea, please get in touch. Check out our documentation to explore Citrea’s technology."

7/7 Citrea has been incubated by Chainway Labs (@chainway_xyz) for over a year.

Read our docs and start exploring Citrea tech 🔧https://t.co/dnznN2N7Gp

Join the community 🧡💛https://t.co/bX4tzGbBP1

On Bitcoin, For Bitcoin.

— Citrea (@citrea_xyz) February 6, 2024

Announcement / Archive
Blog Post / Archive
Citrea Docs
Stacker.news Discussion
Spaces Link