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₿apps Campaign: Stress Testing the Citrea Ecosystem on the Road to Mainnet

Citrea Team

• 4 min read
₿apps Campaign: Stress Testing the Citrea Ecosystem on the Road to Mainnet

Over the last few months, we’ve been running an invite-only testnet campaign called Unfreeze ₿apps for Citrea Mainnet.  We saw 15 different ₿apps join ranging from DEXs, money markets, aggregators, prediction markets,and more. Throughout the campaign, both the participating projects and our team at Citrea gained valuable feedback and insights as we continue our road to mainnet.

₿apps Testnet Campaign

Earlier this year, we set out to find the best way to stress test our ecosystem and introduce ₿apps to the community. We aimed to create an interactive, educational campaign that would onboard community members, test the limits of our ecosystem applications, and help us understand which ₿apps users were most eager to engage with.

This vision led to the Unfreeze ₿apps Campaign, a guided, invite-only experience designed to onboard users step by step while showcasing the unique features of each ₿app. Participants received invite codes through an initial whitelist, ecosystem partners, and community contributions.

Over the course of the last few months, campaign participants completed on-chain tasks to “unfreeze” each of the ₿apps, and once all of the ₿apps’ tasks had been completed, the ₿apper Badge NFT mint became available.

Here are the categories of the 15 ₿apps in the Campaign: 

Metrics & Valuable Takeaways

Throughout the campaign we saw 33,400+ users joining the campaign, with 26,200 of them finishing all of the tasks for all of the ₿apps and minting their ₿apper Badge NFT. This provided a great opportunity for all 15 of the ₿apps to stress test their projects, and to help surface ways to improve what they are building.

User Numbers from the Testnet Campaign

In addition to giving ₿app projects valuable feedback, the campaign proved that our infrastructure can perform flawlessly under heavy user load.

Here’s what some ₿apps shared about their experiences during the campaign:

  • Crest: During the campaign, Crest saw over 68k users trade at least once, 315k+ trades settled, and 100k+ visitors to their website. They also received a key takeaway for a strong demand on a mobile app version of their project.
  • Satsuma: During the campaign, Satsuma welcomed over 140,000 unique traders who conducted nearly 1 million (testnet metrics) trades. They also attracted close to 300,000 unique visitors, generating more than 7 million page views.
  • Nectra: During the campaign, the Nectra team gathered valuable user feedback, particularly around UX improvements, while users already appreciated the platform’s smooth experience. They collaborated with other ₿app projects and recorded over 112,000 positions opened, with 1,955 cBTC ($215M) in TVL and 139.7 million nUSD in debt (testnet metrics). The project also saw 125,000 page visits.
  • Tanari: During the campaign, Tanari registered over 28k new accounts, and over 57,000 BTC transfers (testnet), becoming a favorite in the ecosystem! The community’s main takeaway: Tanari is SIMPLE. Users loved Face ID / fingerprint login, smooth navigation, and sending BTC using usernames. The no-seed-phrase experience and Guardians (social recovery feature) were community favorites, and the team is now integrating improvements as they prepare for mainnet.
  • Zentra: They utilized the campaign to accelerate their brand-building which helped with gaining followers on their socials. The increased testnet traffic also helped them to identify some small bugs, and ways to improve their UI.
  • atomiq: The campaign helped them to identify many edge-cases, while pushing their systems to the limit, providing valuable learnings that they applied to their overall infrastructure. They also got some great feedback on their UI/UX!
  • JuiceSwap: They welcomed over 80k unique wallets and celebrated with the “First Squeezer” NFT mint while growing to 15k Discord members and 6k X followers. Despite early RPC challenges, the team quickly optimized performance, expanded partnerships, and delivered a seamless swap experience for the Citrea community.
  • Fibrous: They saw over 80k users complete 300k+ swaps during the campaign, marking a major milestone in their Bitcoin DeFi expansion. The event served as a full-scale stress test that validated their aggregation tech, strengthened integrations with other ₿apps, and confirmed readiness for mainnet.
  • Signals: Over the last two months, Signals saw around 250k bets from 66k unique wallets, and over 6,300 new Discord members joined their server, providing valuable feedback. This activity helped them to identify contract issues early, improve stability, and refine market parameters.
  • Elitra: The campaign was a strong success for them, driving solid growth in engagement across their community channels and providing valuable feedback to refine their testnet experience.
  • Namoshi: The campaign ran smoothly overall, and being a part of it helped them to narrow down the source of a bug that they were trying to fix. It also allowed them to learn more about other projects building on Citrea, providing opportunities for collaboration.

Marching Towards Mainnet

The Unfreeze ₿apps campaign marked an important community milestone on Citrea’s road to mainnet, bringing builders and users together to test and strengthen Citrea’s ecosystem of Bitcoin applications ahead of launch.

While the campaign showcased the growing momentum of ₿apps built on Citrea, it also provided valuable user feedback, network activity, and system data under heavy user load. This phase ran in parallel with the completion of our audits for both Citrea, the first ZK rollup for Bitcoin, and Clementine, its BitVM-based bridge.

The next and final step before mainnet is the Citrea Risc0-to-BitVM Trusted Setup Ceremony. This process will establish the cryptographic parameters that secure Citrea’s bridge, ensuring its integrity and transparency. Once the ceremony is complete, Citrea will be ready to bring Bitcoin’s first ZK rollup to mainnet, unlocking a new era of Bitcoin programmability, scalability, and native applications built and secured by the Bitcoin network itself.

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