2025 in Review: Technical Milestones, Community and Growth
2025 was a year of ecosystem development and community growth for Citrea. From launching testnet campaign and incubating the first wave of ₿apps, to refining our bridge infrastructure and preparing for mainnet, Citrea has firmly established itself as Bitcoin’s application layer. As we prepare to move into 2026, the Citrea Mainnet launch is up next, and the ecosystem of ₿apps is ready to scale.
Major Highlights of 2025
- Private and Public Audits: Both Citrea rollup infrastructure and the BitVM-based bridge, Clementine, have undergone private audits. Public audit competitions have also concluded, confirming system security and reliability.
- Unfreeze ₿apps Campaign : An invite-only testnet campaign with 15 ₿apps across different categories (DEXs, money markets, consumer ₿apps, prediction markets, aggregators, NFT marketplaces, and more) stress-tested the ecosystem and collected valuable user feedback. Over 26,200 users completed tasks across all projects, minting the ₿apper Badge NFT.
- Citrea Risc0-to-BitVM Trusted Setup Ceremony: This milestone marked the first-ever trusted setup ceremony dedicated to the ZK proofs that BitVM will verify on Bitcoin. The ceremony saw a total of 63 contributions. Importantly, all of Clementine’s bridge signers participated in the ceremony. Because Citrea’s bridge follows a 1-of-N security model, which assumes one honest signer for the system’s security, this inclusion means no new trust assumptions beyond the bridge’s existing security model were introduced through the ceremony itself. See the details.
With these milestones completed, Citrea is ready to bring capital markets to Bitcoin, expanding it beyond a passive store of value to an active, utility-driven network for ₿apps.
Technical Improvements
2025 was a year of technical progress for Citrea. The Citrea engineering team made important technical improvements to both our bridge and rollup infrastructure:
- Clementine Whitepaper: In April, we published Clementine whitepaper to reflect its final design. A key part of Citrea is Clementine bridge, allowing users to exit the rollup and get back their BTC into Bitcoin in a secure, scalable, and trust-minimized way. The Clementine whitepaper marked one of the first documentation of how to use BitVM in a bridge design with clear solutions toward a secure and efficient bridge implementation.
- Clementine V2 R&D with Garbled Circuits and TOOP: While Citrea will be on mainnet with the design featured in the whitepaper, our team has started working on improving the bridge system. We published our R&D efforts for Clementine V2. While still in the research phase, our proposed Clementine v2 replaces BitVM2 with the garbled snark verifier and combined with TOOP. When in practice, Clementine will become cheaper, safer, and more transparent, without requiring users to expect operators to have liquidity.
- Tangerine Upgrade: This testnet upgrade brought significant improvements across proving performance, protocol security, account abstraction, and developer tooling. But most notably, Tangerine upgrade activated full BitVM support in Clementine. With this upgrade in place, we were able to test our bridge extensively. See the details of the Tangerine Upgrade.
- Tangelo Upgrade: This marked the final testnet upgrade before mainnet. The Tangelo upgrade incorporated all audit fixes and introduced improvements to our fee mechanism. With this upgrade in place, Citrea became cheaper and more robust. See the details of the Tangelo Upgrade.
With these technical improvements, the Citrea engineering team ensured that our infrastructure is ready for mainnet!
Unfreeze ₿apps Testnet Campaign
Between July and November 2025, Citrea ran an invite-only testnet campaign, Unfreeze ₿apps, to stress-test the ecosystem ahead of mainnet. During this campaign, Citrea saw a significant growth in its community. While the testnet campaign prioritized early supporters, it opened the doors for new comers to become long-standing community members.
The campaign included 15 ₿apps across categories:
- Money Markets: Zentra Finance, Spine Finance
- DEXs: Satsuma, JuiceSwap
- Consumer Apps: Tanari, Crest
- Bitcoin Lending & Stablecoin: Nectra
- Prediction Markets: Signals
- Yield: Elitra
- Aggregators: Fibrous, DZap
- Atomic Swaps: Garden, atomiq
- NFT Marketplaces: MintPark
- Name Service: Namoshi
Campaign Highlights:
- 33,400 users joined; 26,200 completed all tasks and minted the ₿apper Badge NFT
- Projects received valuable UX feedback, stress-tested infrastructure, and identified performance improvements ahead of mainnet.
The campaign confirmed system robustness under high load and helped all 15 ₿apps refine features for mainnet readiness.
The campaign participants will experience surprises during mainnet and the following milestones.
₿apps Ecosystem, Integrations and Partnerships
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 different needs of Bitcoin users. 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!
Events and Hackathons
Throughout 2025, we hosted and sponsored 15+ global events, including Bitcoin Vegas, Bitcoin Asia, ETH Denver, ETH Seoul, ETHIstanbul, Bitcoin++ Istanbul, and ETHGlobal hackathons in Taipei, India, and Buenos Aires and many more. Highlights included:
- Developer Engagement: Hackathons reached 200+ builders, distributing $40k+ in prizes.
- Hackathon Winners: Signals (Prediction Market), Super DeFi (capital-efficient, composable options), T-Rex Protocol (incentivizing liquidity on Lightning nodes by using Schnorr signatures, built on Citre), BMCP (A ₿app that uses 100KB OP_RETURNs & Schnorr Precompile to execute cross-chain actions by transacting on Bitcoin) and more.
- Global Presence: Events in APAC, Europe, South America, and the US facilitated deep engagement with builders and Bitcoin-native developers.
These events expanded Citrea’s visibility and reinforced its position as Bitcoin’s application layer.
What's Next?
2025 has been an amazing year for Citrea. We launched the first wave of Origins projects on testnet, hosted Hacker Houses and sponsored global hackathons, completed private and public audits, ran the Unfreeze ₿apps campaign with 15 projects, and successfully conducted the first ever Risc0-to-BitVM Trusted Setup Ceremony. Every step of the way, builders, users, and our team pushed the boundaries of what we can do on Bitcoin.
With these milestones completed, Citrea has proven that its infrastructure is ready, scalable, and secure. The first wave of mainnet-ready ₿apps is lined up, and with more projects joining the ecosystem, we continue to grow in advance of the launch of Citrea Mainnet!
All of this sets the stage for an incredible 2026 for Citrea - the year Bitcoin finally gets its application layer live on Mainnet! We’re just about ready to launch the Citrea Mainnet, and with it, a new era of Bitcoin-native applications, DeFi, and user-owned financial tools begins. The journey from testnet to mainnet has been incredible. We are so thankful for our amazing community, partners, and team for all their work and contributions!
Citrea mainnet will be full of surprises for both new comers and early supporters. Stay tuned for 2026…