- Citrea received a $2.7M investment from Galaxy in February
- Those resources are going into development and improvements to the Web3 infrastructure
- One of them was the announcement of Clementine on testnet with its BitVM bridge for Bitcoin
- This should improve the possibilities for Bitcoin-based Smart Contracts
Zero-knowledge rollup Citrea deploys a BitVM bridge on the Bitcoin testnet.
They aim to improve smart contract capabilities for Bitcoin similar to Ethereum, while maintaining a Zero-knowledge approach for computation.
Also, the ability to transact away from the main blockchain will avoid congestion and fees and eventually, we should get feature extensions without losing efficiency through roll-up architecture.
Technical Details of Citrea Deployment
Citrea, which raised $2.7 million in seed funding led by Galaxy in February, continues to empower mainstream blockchains.
Zero-knowledge rollup Citrea is an initiative to expand the capabilities of Bitcoin and make it “the foundation for the world’s finance,” according to an emailed announcement on Tuesday.
Their idea is to utilize the EVM-like BitVM developed a year earlier, which allows Bitcoin to be used not just as a cryptocurrency, but also its network as zero-knowledge computations for Bitcoin Smart Contracts.
To do this, Citrea developed the Clementine “trust-minimized two-way peg program”, which allows a way of locking up Bitcoin on the main chain and then minting an equivalent Bitcoin token for use on Citrea. Thus, this Bitcoin-based token will be able to be used in Bitcoin-based smart contracts without requiring changes to the Bitcoin infrastructure. After using it, those Bitcoin-based tokens can be burned and get back as Bitcoins to the main network.
It is also very important that Citrea retains compatibility with Ethereum, which makes it sound like this is where several bridges of the most important crypto assets and ecosystems converge.
Orkun Mahir Kılıç, CEO of Citrea builder Chainway Labs said:
“It’ll be better with time, because there’s like $1 trillion, as of now, sitting in the Bitcoin blockchain. It is the most secure, battle-tested, and decentralized blockchain. And we are bringing decentralized finance to it.”
He also added:
“Citrea is an EVM-compatible layer, meaning all the applications on Ethereum can simply deploy on Citrea without having to change anything.”
Conclusion
Lately, we’ve seen a lot of developments that are designed to improve the very infrastructure of Web3 itself to open up opportunities for individual developers and entire enterprises.
We’ve also seen an abundance of mutual integrations between major players, and rapid adoption of blockchain by entire nations.
This year can probably be labeled as one of the most productive years for the entire Web3, and there’s still much more to come. Stay plugged in.
