Citrea (CTR)

Citrea (CTR) is a Bitcoin-focused scaling project that aims to bring programmable smart contracts to the Bitcoin ecosystem without moving settlement away from Bitcoin itself. The project is designed as a zero-knowledge rollup that settles directly on Bitcoin and uses BitVM-based verification to support on-chain proof validation. Its core purpose is to expand what developers can build around Bitcoin while preserving the network’s role as the final settlement layer.

At the centre of Citrea is an in-house Type 2 zkEVM, which is intended to provide Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility while using zero-knowledge proofs for scalability and verification. This design allows developers to create composable applications, often described by the project as Bitcoin applications or “₿apps”, that can support more expressive financial and consumer use cases than Bitcoin’s base layer can handle natively.

Citrea’s ecosystem includes Clementine, described as a trust-minimized BTC bridge, which is designed to connect Bitcoin liquidity to Citrea-based applications. The platform also features ctUSD, a compliant stablecoin issued by MoonPay, giving users a dollar-denominated asset for payments, trading and decentralised finance activity within the network.

The project sits within a growing category of Bitcoin layer-2 and rollup initiatives that seek to make BTC more useful in DeFi and smart-contract environments. Citrea is backed by a group of crypto and technology investors including Founders Fund, Galaxy, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Erik Voorhees, Eric Wall, Maven11 and Delphi. Its distinct positioning comes from combining Bitcoin settlement, ZK proofs, EVM-style programmability and bridge infrastructure in one ecosystem.