1 Year of Citrea Testnet
Today marks one year since Citrea Testnet went live, and what a year it’s been. In just 12 months, Citrea has grown into the leading Bitcoin application layer, with 30+ ₿apps joining our ecosystem, $14M raised in a round led by Founders Fund, and Citrea data dominating Bitcoin Testnet4. We achieved multiple industry firsts, from testing Bitcoin as a data availability layer to deploying fully complete BitVM bridge design on Bitcoin Testnet4, while maturing the infrastructure through private audits and now public audits ahead of mainnet.
Let’s dive into the last year for Citrea, review all that we’ve accomplished, and look ahead to our Mainnet Launch!
Heavily Tested Bitcoin as a Data Availability Layer
As the first rollup on Bitcoin, our infrastructure needed to heavily test using Bitcoin as a data availability layer to implement the most optimized solution for the most scarce blockspace.
During its 1 year of testnet, Citrea posted 1GB+ of testnet state to Bitcoin Testnet4. Heavy Citrea testnet usage helped us evaluate our infrastructure. We've optimized our proving and Bitcoin transaction-building services based on Citrea testnet’s heavy load.
Our rollup infrastructure is now fully optimized for Bitcoin to secure substantial Citrea transaction loads.
Clementine: Deploying First Complete BitVM Bridge Design on Testnet
Citrea achieved a historic milestone this year with the deployment of Clementine on Bitcoin Testnet 4. This milestone marked the first time to test a fully complete BitVM-based bridge design. We also published the Clementine Whitepaper, marking the first documentation of how to use BitVM in a bridge design with clear solutions toward a secure and efficient bridge implementation.
Clementine demonstrated how Bitcoin can optimistically verify a fully programmable layer while introducing novel solutions for a provably secure Bitcoin light client on Bitcoin and capital efficiency. By enabling the safest and most trust-minimized way to extend BTC into decentralized finance, Clementine addresses one of Bitcoin’s longest-standing bottlenecks. Clementine not only expands Bitcoin’s utility but also establishes Citrea as a core contributor driving forward the future of BitVM technology.
Announced our $14M Series A Round
Towards the end of last year, we celebrated a major milestone by raising $14 million in our Series A, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund with participation from Maven11, Mirana, dao5, Erik Voorhees, Balaji Srinivasan, Nikil Viswanathan, Mert Mumtaz, and Jameson Lopp, bringing total funding to $16.7 million.
The round supports our mission to expand Bitcoin from a passive store of value into a fully programmable asset using zero-knowledge technology. Alongside the raise, we also launched Citrea Origins, an exclusive developer program accelerating the growth of Bitcoin-backed decentralized applications. These achievements highlight a year of foundational growth, preparing our ecosystem and infrastructure for the upcoming mainnet launch.
Launch of Citrea Origins - Unique Incubation Program for Bitcoin
During this last year, we launched Citrea Origins, our unique incubation program for Bitcoin applications (₿apps), designed to take projects from idea to launch to scale with full-stack support across engineering, product, strategy, community, and fundraising. The first cohort - Tanari, Satsuma, Nectra, and Crest have already gone live, delivering everything from Bitcoin-first exchanges to non-custodial lending and user-owned financial platforms, demonstrating how Bitcoin can power real-world applications.
Building on this momentum, the second cohort has started coming out of stealth, including Signals, a range-based Bitcoin price prediction market, and Zentra, a decentralized money market, and CellFi, SMS-based peer-to-peer payments, further expanding the Citrea ecosystem and proving the growing depth of Bitcoin-native products.
Ecosystem of ₿apps
Over the last year, since Citrea launched on Bitcoin Testnet4, we’ve been working to build out our ecosystem of ₿apps, which we are proud to say now exceeds 30 projects.
Over the past year, Citrea has steadily built out a diverse and robust ecosystem of Bitcoin-native applications, each contributing to a fully featured, trust-minimized financial layer. We ensured core decentralized financial primitives are in place for Bitcoin by onboarding DEXs, money markets, stablecoins, payments and bridges. We also expanded our ecosystem to include prediction markets, consumer applications and high performance decentralized exchanges. We onboarded key wallet partners to let users across ecosystems have access to programmable BTC.
We onboarded 20+ infrastructure partners to ensure developers can easily and securely build on Citrea. Together, these projects form a rounded ecosystem that unlocks Bitcoin’s full potential as a programmable asset. Explore the full Citrea Ecosystem here.
There will be some big ₿apps coming to Citrea mainnet. Stay tuned!
Hackathons & Building on Citrea
Expanding Citrea’s visibility and value among builders was a top priority. We sponsored 5+ hackathons and distributed $24K+ in prizes.
Over 120 builders joined our hackathon tracks, and we reached out to builders from APAC, Europe and South America. We also organized online hackathons to broaden our reach.
Our main tracks during hackathons were DeFi, privacy, social, payments and open innovation. Winners of Citrea hackathon tracks also became main hackathon track winners.
We showed developers the value of building on Bitcoin and onboarded them to the motherchain.
Last Phase of Testnet - Audits
Citrea has already entered the auditing phase. The codebase is undergoing two separate audits: one for the rollup infrastructure and one for Citrea's BitVM-based bridge infrastructure.
Here are the completed private audits, available for review by the community:
There are also a series of public audit competitions that we conducted with Cantina, those findings are currently under review by the technical team, with findings being implemented.
Citrea's Infrastructure and Ecosystem is Almost Ready for Bitcoin Mainnet
We took on a huge problem to solve in the industry: how to scale Bitcoin base layer without changing its consensus and compromising the availability and verifiability of transaction data.
Over the past year, we've completed and tested the technology that will answer this problem. Alongside technical developments, we made sure our ecosystem is ready and mature for users to experience us on mainnet.
Citrea Mainnet is just the beginning. Get ready for programmable money.