**Yes, Citrea is actually real π€―**
Citrea is a massive change to the Bitcoin ecosystem by allowing a massive increase in transaction throughput on Bitcoin as well as full EVM compatibility. Let's break down what that actually means in approachable language.
A lot of the terminology with things like "zk rollups" can be confusing, so I'll do my best to simplify things here.
**Zero-knowledge ("ZK") here isn't for privacy, it's for scaling/verification**
A lot of confusion comes from the term "zero-knowledge" often being conflated with privacy-preserving. In the case of zk here, it's being used for it's ability to succinctly (read: in a tiny amount of data) prove something is true and allow anyone to verify the claim without knowing every piece of data used in the proof.
**Citrea is a validity rollup that leverages zk proofs to reduce its on-chain footprint**
This means that the amount of data needing to be published to Bitcoin's base layer is miniscule (just a small zk proof) compared to the amount of data off-chain (the entire state of the Citrea blockchain), and is easily verified on almost any device.
Citrea validators "batch" transaction on the Citrea chain and publish a single, small proof that summarizes the change in Citrea chain state since the last published state and inscribes it into a Bitcoin transaction (yes, similar to those inscriptions). This proof will only verify properly if the validator is honest, allowing anyone on the network to prove whether or not the proof published is valid.
More on validity rollups here from @lightcoin:
[
validity rollups on bitcoin
](https://bitcoinrollups.org/)
**Citrea enables EVM-style smart contracts w/o changes to Bitcoin**
While you may have a vitriolic hatred for all things Ethereum (for legitimate or illegitimate reasons), the ability to create complex, Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin without needing the base layer to fully store, parse, and validate those smart contracts feels like the best of both worlds to me.
This can enable things like AMMs (think Uniswap) to function with actual Bitcoin as the currency involved. The possibilities are practically limitless.
**Citrea is "trust-minimized," not "trustless"**
While this may feel semantic, I think it's an important distinction to make. Citrea changes the trust model from a federated multisig (a la Liquid) where you have to trust that a majority of participants remain honest to one where as long as a single network participant is honest funds cannot be confiscated or frozen.
As long as one individual validator remains honest, no other validator can confiscate pegged-in funds or mess with them in any way. Additionally, any validator acting maliciously will be subject to slashing (losing their own Bitcoin via the challenge-response protocol in BitVM) and thus have a financial incentive to be honest unless they know for sure that every single validator on the network will allow them to be malicious.
**Citrea would be even better with covenants**
Yes, I'm going to mention covenants π
Part of the minor trust required in Citrea can be reduced even further with covenants in Bitcoin:
Trustless Settlement | Citrea
Additionally an opcode that fully verifies zk proofs directly on Bitcoin (i.e. not via BitVM) would allow a completely trustless zk rollup, but deciding on a proof to enshrine in Bitcoin's consensus layer is very unlikely at this point.
**Conclusion**
I'm insanely excited for this to be fully open-sourced and usable on testnet, and will share updates as I see them along with testing this out ASAP.
Special thanks to @0x_orkun for giving me a sneak peak and letting me contribute to the docs, helped me have a much better understanding of what Citrea really is! I'd highly recommend reading through their docs if you want to better grasp all of the ins and outs:
If you see something that could be improved in the docs, be sure to open an issue or submit your own PR, as the docs are open source themselves!
GitHub
GitHub - chainwayxyz/citrea-docs: citrea-docs repository
citrea-docs repository. Contribute to chainwayxyz/citrea-docs development by creating an account on GitHub.
