The Citrea Recap — January
Welcome to The Citrea Recap, the only newsletter covering everything Citrea.
Citrea entered 2025 with a strong focus on ecosystem growth and community expansion. January was about Kumquats, Citrea native applications, and regional expansions. If you haven’t already, sign up for The Citrea Recap to stay updated.
Here’s what we’ll be covering today:
- Citrea's First-Ever Fork: Kumquat Officially Goes Live
- Citrea's BitVM Bridge - Clementine's Latest Design
- Kumquat NFTs to Celebrate the Fork
- Citrea is Becoming Bitcoin's Application Layer
- Alpha for Next Month
Citrea's First-Ever Fork: Kumquat Officially Goes Live
Citrea engineers worked tirelessly for months to enable Kumquat. At block height 5546000, Citrea's first-ever fork, Kumquat, arrived.
Kumquat fork introduced crucial upgrades to the Citrea Testnet. As a Bitcoin rollup, Citrea must be as efficient as possible in its architecture. Kumquat fork made Citrea's prover cheaper and more robust in addition to making Citrea smaller!
Citrea can now generate light clients which are essential for Citrea's bridge Clementine and easy verifiability of Citrea by every user from anywhere. Read more about the Kumquat fork here.
The Main Squeeze: Citrea engineers are constantly shipping. Be on the lookout!
Citrea's BitVM Bridge - Clementine's Latest Design
Building a secure bridge between Bitcoin and a secondary layer has long been a major challenge in extending BTC's utility. About a year ago, Citrea proposed Clementine - one of the first bridge designs using BitVM. Since then, BitVM researchers have made numerous improvements to BitVM itself, allowing for more efficient and secure bridge constructions. Citrea team updated Clementine's design in accordance with the latest research.
With the introduction of BitVM 2, Clementine’s design has been enhanced, eliminating the complexities around verification logic and simplifying the peg-in and peg-out processes. Clementine's latest design was recently featured in the Stanford Blockchain Review.
The Main Squeeze: Citrea is about to make BTC fully programmable!
Kumquat NFTs to Celebrate the Fork
Citrea ecosystem project MintPark launched 5,000 Kumquat NFTs on the Citrea Testnet to celebrate both the Citrea Fork Kumquat and the Lunar New Year. The NFTs were minted in 2 minutes.
This unique drop celebrates two major milestones: the successful Citrea Kumquat Fork and the joyous occasion of Chinese New Year. Kumquats, symbolizing prosperity and good fortune, perfectly align with the spirit of these celebrations. Each NFT in this limited collection will feature vibrant, culturally inspired designs, blending MintPark's creativity with the new beginnings of the Lunar New Year. -Mintpark
Find the Kumquat NFTs here.
The Main Squeeze: The opportunities and fun on Citrea are endless!
Citrea is Becoming Bitcoin's Application Layer
Citrea started 2025 with a singular mission: go to mainnet with Citrea native applications. Citrea's unique value proposition empowers founders and builders to create applications that are simply not possible elsewhere.
To facilitate this, we launched Citrea Origins, a unique incubation program and a community of builders. We recently announced our on-going mentorship program with university students on their senior projects, with Citrea Origins driving this effort.
These university students will showcase their projects at a demo day on February 15th. Citrea is on a relentless mission to support builders and turn their ideas into real businesses.
The Main Squeeze: Citrea is becoming Bitcoin's application layer, with Citrea Origins as the driving force!
Alpha for Next Month
2025 is just getting started. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming next:
- Citrea Local Ambassadors 👀
- Catch us at ETHDenver!
- Citrea native applications are on the way!
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