Recently, Robin Linus, the author of the BitVM whitepaper, has harshly accused the zero-knowledge roll-up project Citrea of dishonest marketing. In Linus’s words, the adverts for Citrea contain a lot of misinformation regarding its association and capacity.
Citrea just received $2.7M from Galaxy Ventures and recently announced a 7 million seed funding round to expand Bitcoin by adding Ethereum-like smart contract capabilities via zero-knowledge proofs.
But Linus has gone on X, a communications platform acquired by Jack in 2021 (previously known as Twitter), and claims that Citrea is capitalizing on BitVM to obtain public attention and investments by seemingly being more involved in the project than it is.
Citrea’s response and future plans
When responding to the allegations made by Robin Linus, the author of the BitVM whitepaper, Orkun Kılıç, the co-founder of Chainway Labs, the developers of Citrea, has pointed out that Linus’s allegations have cast an unfair light on their project.
According to Kılıç, the marketing of Citrea is proper to the advancements and the needs of the project; he underlines that the team has experience in field innovation and expert knowledge in zero-knowledge technologies.
This paper presents Citrea, an attempt to build an execution layer over the Bitcoin blockchain using zero-knowledge proofs to enhance its usage.
Zero-knowledge proof is a form of cryptographic protocol that enables one party to prove knowledge of a certain piece of information without divulging it. These techniques, which include zk-SNARKs in Zcash and zk-rollups in Ethereum, have been successfully applied to enhance the privacy and throughput of cryptocurrencies.
Citrea’s technical information states that their proofs are “embedded in the Bitcoin and optimistically verified through BitVM.”
Pantera Capital has, in particular, seen a huge opportunity in Bitcoin in DeFi, arguing that dApps could add as much as half a trillion dollars in value to Bitcoin and make Bitcoin DeFi a key segment of the broader market. As we know, Ethereum is at the forefront of the DeFi market; however, analysts at Pantera Capital have valued Bitcoin’s potential in the dApp scene at about $225 billion.