Introducing Citrea: Bitcoin’s First ZK Rollup

Citrea introduces itself as the first rollup on Bitcoin, using zero-knowledge proofs to scale Bitcoin blockspace without changing its consensus rules. The article argues that existing scaling proposals either create alternative blockspaces that do not inherit Bitcoin's security or move demand off-chain to sidechains. Citrea batches thousands of transactions, processes them in a zkVM, and inscribes succinct validity proofs that are verified on Bitcoin L1 through a native verifier smart contract built in BitVM. The project says it ships a Type 2 zkEVM built with RISC Zero, and it has an internal devnet while a public testnet and trust-minimized two-way peg design are still in development.