What to Expect from Citrea Mainnet: Privacy, Payments, and Earn with Your Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s simplicity is what makes it the most secure and censorship-resistant monetary network. Providing privacy and capital-efficient financial markets should be handled by an execution layer that preserves Bitcoin’s guarantees.
There is a burning need for private Bitcoin applications, Bitcoin savings accounts, and Bitcoin capital markets. In the current landscape, users are suffering from custodians, inefficient Bitcoin capital markets, and poorly designed privacy solutions.
Citrea mainnet delivers the UX improvements needed for real use cases: private transfers, trading BTC, sustainable Bitcoin capital markets, and more. Importantly, Citrea accomplishes this without requiring a separate Layer 1 or alternative consensus mechanisms. Users will keep Bitcoin at the center of every action.
Better UX for Privacy on Bitcoin
Today, the state of privacy on Bitcoin is limited to basic coinjoin techniques, custodial mixers, and fragmented tools with inconsistent privacy guarantees. Coinjoins like JoinMarket or Whirlpool can improve anonymity but introduce UX friction and still leak metadata. Custodial mixers require trusting operators not to steal funds or log activity, and many have been shut down or compromised. Federated solutions offer stronger privacy but come with multisig custody assumptions. And wallet-level tactics like UTXO management or address rotation place too much complexity on users while providing only limited privacy.
Citrea enables a new class of Bitcoin privacy protocols that can provide superior anonymity than the previous solutions. Its fully programmable environment allows developers to build sophisticated privacy systems that use zero-knowledge proofs to fully sever the link between deposits and withdrawals. These systems create large, cryptographically enforced anonymity sets rather than relying on user coordination, eliminating common leakage points such as timing, amount patterns, or UTXO traceability. Because complex logic can run natively on Citrea, wallets can automate shielding, unshielding, and key rotation, allowing users to maintain strong anonymity by default without relying on manual steps that typically reveal metadata on Bitcoin today.
In addition to superior anonymity, Citrea can also enable mathematical compliance. Protocols like Privacy Pools with Proof of Innocence, powered by recursive zk-proofs, allow users to demonstrate they are not associated with illicit activity without revealing their entire transaction graph. This creates a compliance-compatible and trust-minimized form of privacy, something Bitcoin has never had at scale.
With account abstraction, Citrea provides an entirely different UX layer. Users can enjoy smart-wallet functionality such as gas sponsorship, passkey login, paymasters, batched transactions, and seamless private transfers. When combined with privacy pools, users get a smooth, mobile-native experience: privately send or receive BTC, trade without exposing wallet history.
Crest application in the Citrea ecosystem is working on bringing superior privacy to Bitcoin.
Payments Without Custodians
Bitcoin payments today face friction: slow confirmation times, fee volatility, complex wallet flows, and reliance on custodial services or trusted Lightning hubs for fast transfers. These UX bottlenecks make seamless, everyday payments difficult.
Citrea addresses this by introducing precompiles for essential Bitcoin primitives, such as SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160, the hashing functions foundational to Bitcoin addresses, HTLCs, and Lightning compatibility. Developers can build natively Bitcoin-aligned applications without rewriting or approximating Bitcoin cryptography, ensuring interoperability and low-cost computation.
Citrea also includes advanced primitives like secp256r1 (P-256), the curve used by most modern hardware-secured systems, including Apple’s Secure Enclave and passkey-based authentication frameworks. With this precompile, Citrea enables fully on-chain signature verification from secure hardware or biometric logins, removing the need for manual key storage or seed phrases. Users can sign blockchain transactions with the same hardware that unlocks their phone, dramatically improving safety and ease of use.
Additionally, Citrea can integrate tightly with the Lightning Network. Citrea’s integration with atomiq lets users swap between Citrea BTC and native Lightning BTC. Users can swap their BTC Lightning with USDC, cBTC, and different assets instantly.
Tanari application in the Citrea ecosystem is a prime example of bringing this superior UX experience to Bitcoin.
Earn with Trust-Minimized BTC
Today, Bitcoin yield is primarily earned on alternative chains or custodial platforms, requiring trust in multisig committees or opaque financial institutions. These environments create misaligned incentives, and expose users to unnecessary counterparty risk.
Citrea BTC (cBTC) changes this completely. As the safest form of BTC on a fully programmable Bitcoin layer, cBTC, powered by the Clementine Bitcoin bridge, relies on cryptographic security and is optimistically verified by the Bitcoin Network. Within Citrea’s composable environment, cBTC can seamlessly move across applications, enabling users to trade, provide liquidity, earn yield, and borrow against their BTC in a trust-minimized way.
On Citrea, BTC can finally participate in efficient, composable financial markets, borrowing, lending, trading, liquidity providing, and structured yield products, without the unnecessary trust assumptions. Citrea’s fully programmable environment allows for more optimized lending environments.
Zentra Finance, Nectra, Satsuma, JuiceSwap and other applications in the Citrea ecosystem are built to let users earn yield on their BTC with as few trust assumptions as possible, bringing BTC into modern financial markets without sacrificing security.
Conclusion
Citrea delivers the missing programmability and UX layer that Bitcoin has needed for years. From privacy applications and biometric-signature wallets to Lightning interoperability and efficient BTC yield markets, Citrea Mainnet will offer a powerful, user-friendly ecosystem built directly on Bitcoin’s security.
Beyond its technical advancements, Citrea Mainnet is designed to meet the real needs of Bitcoin users with a composable ecosystem of Bitcoin-first applications where privacy, payments, and yield can all be accessed in a trust-minimized, seamless experience.