Today, Citrea Team unveils Citrea, the inaugural ZK Rollup designed to elevate Bitcoin’s blockspace capabilities through zero-knowledge technology. Departing from traditional scalability solutions that move security and demand off-chain, Citrea introduces an approach to scale Bitcoin comprehensively with zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring on-chain verifiability and data availability within the Bitcoin network. This positions Citrea as one of the first scaling solutions to enable more complex applications without compromising Bitcoin’s security or altering its consensus rules.

The prevalent issue with creating new blockspace solutions lies in their inability to inherit Bitcoin’s fundamental properties of security, decentralization, and censorship resistance. Citrea addresses this challenge by scaling the entirety of Bitcoin’s blockspace using zero-knowledge proofs, offering a secure and decentralized alternative. It does so using BitVM as the bridging mechanism between the rollup and the Bitcoin blockchain.

BitVM allows the bridge to be set up between the rollup operator (the prover in the BitVM), and some set of monitors (the verifiers in the BitVM). This allows the operator to be penalized and have bonded funds confiscated by any of the verifiers if they attempt to process an inaccurate withdrawal. The BitVM instance, if challenged by a verifier during withdrawal, would actually verify the full Zero Knowledge Proof in the BitVM challenge-response process.

As the demand for Bitcoin blockspace continues to soar, demonstrated by increasing fee rates and heightened interest, existing scalability proposals fall short in addressing the growing need for inclusion in the blockspace, the announcement said. While some solutions redirect demand to separate consensus protocols or sidechains, Citrea aims to stand out by actively and efficiently utilizing Bitcoin blockspace verifiably without compromising its core principles.

Citrea’s zero-knowledge rollup creates an execution shard, batching multiple transactions with minimal data essential for on-chain verification. This method allows Citrea to maximize the efficient utilization of underlying blockspace while maintaining the full security of Bitcoin’s Layer 1.

The platform’s mission is to advance Bitcoin into the “next phase”, per the announcement, positioning it as the foundation for the world’s financial infrastructure. Citrea’s architecture goal is to provide a modular world for Bitcoin, creating consistent fee revenue for miners, trustlessly scaling BTC, and offering developers a versatile environment for building applications on Bitcoin.

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Bitcoin startup Chainway has taken a significant stride in the space with its introduction of the first Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) transaction on bitcoin. This is part of Chainway’s continued efforts to implement ZK rollups on bitcoin, a move that may offer enhanced scalability and privacy features to bitcoin.

Chainway’s recent demonstration serves as a proof of concept, illustrating how their future ZK rollup is intended to function when integrated with bitcoin. This integration seeks to combine the flexibility and programmability commonly associated with EVM and the robust security infrastructure inherent to bitcoin.

Diving deeper into the mechanics, rollups work by grouping transactions occurring off-chain, batching them, and then publishing this consolidated batch onto the bitcoin blockchain. This process significantly optimizes computational efficiency while still benefiting from the foundational security of the bitcoin network.

The inclusion of the zero-knowledge or ‘ZK’ variant in rollups introduces a layer of cryptographic privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs enable one to confirm the veracity of a transaction without having to disclose its specific details. With ZK proofs embedded, the system not only maintains transactional privacy but also ensures mathematical certainty, rooted directly into bitcoin infrastructure.

The foundation of Chainway’s approach is a synthesis of zero-knowledge proofs with the Ordinals protocol. Chainway’s rollup is designed to publish L2 state proofs and represent a consolidated set of transactions. Through a meticulous process, Chainway’s ZK circuit will scan each bitcoin block, extract prior state proofs for verification, and incorporate user-driven transaction envelopes into the current batch.

A noteworthy aspect of Chainway’s initiative is its execution layer, powered by the EVM –– a feature familiar to those acquainted with the Ethereum ecosystem. The team at Chainway has successfully embedded the EVM into a ZK-STARK-based virtual machine, resulting in the creation of the zkEVM. This new architecture is designed to produce zero-knowledge proofs for the rollup’s state transitions, ensuring both transactional transparency and privacy. Furthermore, Chainway’s rollup is developed to be fully compatible with EVM, suggesting that tools and utilities familiar in the Ethereum ecosystem such as Metamask could be integrated seamlessly.

Comparing Chainway’s rollup with existing EVM sidechains provides clear distinctions. Notably, Chainway’s rollup operates without the dependency on a separate network of nodes. It’s built directly on bitcoin’s infrastructure. In contrast, current sidechains don’t leave an actual imprint on bitcoin, and as such, their transactions cannot be validated by simply examining the bitcoin blockchain.

Chainway’s efforts to integrate Ethereum’s EVM with bitcoin’s infrastructure represent a thoughtful and considered approach to enhancing bitcoin’s potential functionalities. By aiming to merge the flexibility of Ethereum with the security of bitcoin, Chainway’s potential implementation of ZK rollups on bitcoin could signal a new phase in the space.

While a soft fork would be necessary to unlock the full capabilities of a ZK rollup on bitcoin –– i.e. a real trustless peg mechanism between the rollup and on-chain bitcoin –– this approach seems to strike a good balance between the ideal and what is possible without any changes to bitcoin. Indeed, this advancement could already be quite useful for trustless Ordinals-based tokens such as BRC-20s.

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