Citrea Brings ZK Rollups To Bitcoin

Bitcoin continues to move past its pet rock phase.

Leveraging zero-knowledge technology, a new scaling solution dubbed Citrea launched on Feb. 6, aiming to address the lack of DeFi on the industry’s oldest blockchain. ZK rollups work by bundling hundreds of transactions into a single transaction which then gets posted to the base chain.

“Instead of trading BRC-20s, we can now build DeFi on Bitcoin,” said Orkun Kilic, co-founder of Chainway Labs, the development team behind Citrea.

He told The Defiant that Citrea will help create a speedier and cheaper Bitcoin while also addressing the security budget concerns. “Citrea contributes to Bitcoin's long-term health by paying lots of fees to miners, increasing the hashrate and security,” Kilic said.

Citrea makes use of BitVM, a computing paradigm that offers Turing completeness on Bitcoin. BitVM allows for smart contract programmability, opening the door to DeFi applications not seen before on the network.

ZK rollups are popular in the Ethereum ecosystem, where they are trustless. On Citrea, they are trust-minimized due to some limitations from BitVM. However, according to Kilic, they only require one party to stay honest to maintain the security model.

Kilic claims that Bitcoin’s scalability had been previously limited to off-chain solutions. With Citrea now offering on-chain verifiability and data availability, it will allow for a massive increase in transaction throughput without sacrificing security on the Bitcoin base chain.

According to the developer, the team aims to open source the project’s code repository in March, and launch a testnet in April.