What is Citrea?
Citrea is the first Bitcoin platform that enhances the capabilities of Bitcoin’s blockspace with zero-knowledge technology, enabling the safest and most trust-minimized way to use Bitcoin. With this unique construction, Citrea enables Bitcoin to function as a fully programmable platform and introduces a new category of applications: Bapps.
Bitcoin has the most decentralized and censorship-resistant blockspace with the largest capital in blockchain history. The only meaningful way to scale Bitcoin and its native asset, BTC, is to preserve the core values that define Bitcoin while enhancing its expressivity and utility. This would mean to inherit Bitcoin's data availability, reorg resistance, censorship resistance and validity. An application layer built with zero-knowledge technology is the most secure and efficient way to achieve this.
What makes Citrea Unique?
Citrea is the first programmable Bitcoin platform that relies solely on the Bitcoin Network as its source of truth.
Full Bitcoin Security
Citrea inherits Bitcoin’s validity, liveness, re-org resistance and censorship resistance (WIP). This is achieved through Citrea’s effective usage of Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology and BitVM.
Bitcoin Settlement
For the first time in Bitcoin history, a fully programmable solution is settled on Bitcoin. Citrea light client proofs are optimistically verified on Bitcoin via BitVM, introducing trust-minimized two-way peg mechanism and enabling the first-ever Layer 2 verification on Bitcoin.
Fully EVM-Compatible
Citrea uses RISC Zero to build a Type 2 zkEVM, fully equivalent to Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM). This allows EVM developers to effortlessly build on Bitcoin.