Introducing Citrea: Bitcoin’s First ZK Rollup

Citrea introduces itself as the first rollup that enhances Bitcoin blockspace with zero-knowledge technology, scaling Bitcoin itself rather than moving activity to sidechains. The article argues that existing scaling proposals fail because they redirect demand to separate consensus protocols, while Citrea keeps execution and data availability on Bitcoin without consensus changes. It states that Citrea batches transactions, processes them in a zkVM, and inscribes succinct validity proofs on Bitcoin L1 via a verifier smart contract built in BitVM. The article also says Citrea ships a Type 2 zkEVM built using RISC Zero, and that its devnet and public testnet are in development, with a bridge design to be revealed in coming weeks.