“Citrea Will Make Bitcoin a Real Capital Asset”
“Most institutions that invest in digital assets buy Bitcoin first,” Citrea co-founder and CEO Orkun Mahir Kilic said in a recent interview with Maeil Business Newspaper. However, it is impossible to use Bitcoin productively,” he said.
“Citrea can be used to make Bitcoin function as a key asset driving global financial infrastructure,” he said.
Citrea is known for being invested by Peter Thiel. The cumulative investment attraction so far is around $16.7 million. It has also received investments from Galaxy Ventures and Delphi Digital, including the $14 million Series A led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Bitcoin L2, Citrea Using ZK
Citrea is a Bitcoin Layer (L)2 project. Simply put, the goal is to implement DeFi with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin L2 has actually had a ‘long history of failure’. Bitcoin is a chain that is intentionally limited to simple remittances for security, so it is difficult to make it a programmable chain.
Bitcoin L2 generally tried to solve the problem by doing smart contracts outside Bitcoin and entering only the final result into Bitcoin.
To this end, when a user entrusts Bitcoin, it is made into wrapped Bitcoin and bridged to distribute it in Bitcoin L2.
This has the problem of a single failure point occurring on the platform that is wrapping in reality.
Citrea made the Bitcoin body network directly monitor this mathematically through technologies called Youngji-sik (ZK) and BitVM.
ZK is a technology that creates a kind of “proof certificate without content,” so it can go beyond the capacity limits of Bitcoin. BitVM is a technology that allows Bitcoin to verify certificates made from ZK.
“Bitcoin plays a very excellent role as a means of storing value, but it has structural limitations because it was not designed to be programmable in the first place,” CEO Kilic said. “The starting point of Citrea is that Bitcoin should not simply stay as an asset asleep in a cold wallet.”
The real ZK project Citrea
ZK is often used in the crypto industry like ‘Deus Ex Machina’. If there is a point where it is difficult to verify the blockchain, it is attached to it that it can be solved with ZK.
For this reason, there was a perception among investors that projects talking about ZK were unreliable.
The difference, however, is that Citrea has already proven its ZK technology. “When Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022, the Citrea team created a ‘not guilty’ that users could prove in ZK that they were not related to the sanctioned address without revealing their identity,” CEO Kalich said. “As Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has publicly mentioned, the technology has certainly been proven.”
Citrea’s Bitcoin Bridge (Clementine) is the first working Bitcoin Bridge, he said. “Since January 27, Citrea has already reached the stage of commercialization.”
Citrea has more than 40 applications running in real time with the launch of the mainnet in January.
The institution’s adoption of Bitcoin L2
Recently, “Etherium” is attracting attention as institutions’ adoption of blockchain increases. Citrea, however, believes that through Bitcoin L2, the institution will also be paying attention to Bitcoin.
Among Citrea’s products, ctUSD is a representative product aimed at the institution. ctUSD is a regulated Bitcoin native stablecoin.
ctUSD is backed 1:1 with short-term U.S. Treasury and cash and is in line with the Genius Bill. It is issued by blockchain payment company ‘MoonPay’.
“ctUSD is not bridged by other chains, but issued by Citrea, eliminating bridge risks and liquidity fragmentation issues that have hindered Bitcoin DeFi’s growth,” CEO Kalich said.
Citrea is about to launch its own token. Citrea launched Mainnet first, unlike other projects.
Citrea has been going through roadmaps including the launch of Mainnet in January, the establishment of a foundation in March, securing institutional liquidity in May and the launch of the ctUSD Pre-Deposit Vault.
“If the token is released first, the project can raise capital only with narrative while delaying its technical responsibility,” CEO Kalich said. “Citrea believed that tokens released on empty networks are just a means of speculation, and that technical performance and ecosystem growth should be verified first in the production environment before introducing tokens.”
