Share this article
Bitcoin Rollup Citrea Deploys BitVM-Based Bridge 'Clementine' on Testnet
Citrea's aim is to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer to make it "the foundation for the world's finance."
Updated Sep 24, 2024, 2:55 p.m. Published Sep 24, 2024, 2:00 p.m.
- Zero-knowledge rollup Citrea has deployed its BitVM bridge on the Bitcoin testnet.
- Clementine harnesses BitVM, a computing paradigm designed to allow Ethereum-style smart contracts on Bitcoin and which could also pave the way for zero-knowledge computations.
Bitcoin zero-knowledge rollup Citrea has deployed its BitVM-based bridge Clementine to the Bitcoin testnet.
Citrea, which raised $2.7 million in seed funding led by Galaxy in February, aims to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer to make it "the foundation for the world's finance," according to an emailed announcement on Tuesday.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
In a blog post in March, the Citrea team described Clementine as a "trust-minimized two-way peg program," essentially a way of locking up bitcoin on the main chain and then minting an equivalent bitcoin token for use on Citrea; to reverse the process, that token is burned and the bitcoin can then be withdrawn on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Clementine harnesses BitVM, a computing paradigm introduced last year by the Bitcoin developer Robin Linus, ultimately designed to allow Ethereum-style smart contracts on Bitcoin, and which could also pave the way for zero-knowledge computations.
Citrea is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the smart-contracts-executing software that powers the Ethereum protocol, similar to an operating system on a computer.
"Citrea is an EVM-compatible layer, meaning all the applications on Ethereum can simply deploy on Citrea without having to change anything," Orkun Mahir Kılıç, CEO of Citrea builder Chainway Labs, told CoinDesk in an interview.
BitVM is a conduit that can connect rollups to the Bitcoin network, allowing transactions to be settled away from the main blockchain to mitigate congestion and fees. The basic setup of BitVM involves using cryptography to compress programs into sub-programs that can then be executed within Bitcoin transactions, according to a white paper published by Linus along with five co-authors.
Read More: Bitcoin Layer 2 Rootstock Verifies Zero-Knowledge SNARK
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
