The Citrea mainnet has officially launched, marking a significant milestone for Bitcoin utility. This pioneering Bitcoin ZK-rollup enables users to engage in decentralized finance (DeFi), for lending or trading directly with their BTC, without relying on centralized intermediaries or leaving Bitcoin’s security dome.
What Citrea Does
Historically, using Bitcoin in DeFi involves wrapping up the Bitcoin and moving it onto other blockchains, which also comes with risks and trust issues. Now, users can use Citrea as a completely independent execution layer.
By using the Clementine bridge, Citrea uses BitVM (a computing paradigm to express Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts) and the zero-knowledge proof technology to produce cBTC, which is a fully backed representation of Bitcoin (1:1) secured by the consensus of the Bitcoin network, and therefore, the security of the Citrea execution layer is maintained and protected by the Bitcoin network, meaning, the system’s safety is enforced by the Bitcoin network itself, requiring just one honest participant to challenge fraud. This makes the Citrea Mainnet a completely independent and self-sustaining application layer, creating the first true programmable, or “native” Bitcoin economy.
This Launch Reshapes the Bitcoin Ecosystem
The impact of the Citrea mainnet on the Bitcoin ecosystem is paramount because it provides the first substantial, credible solution to Bitcoin’s programmability dilemma. It also introduces the ctUSD, a compliant stablecoin (backed by MoonPay) that will allow for deep, native liquidity through over 30 integrated ₿apps, including decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Satsuma, and lending protocols like Morpho.
With these changes, Bitcoin transitions from a static store of value to being dynamic, yield-generating capital. The Citrea mainnet seeks to drive blockchain economic activity that generates real-world transactions with fees settled into Bitcoin’s base layer, providing miners with increased incentives and forming a recurring, prosperous value-accruing intermediate layer around Bitcoin itself.
