Bitcoin Scaling is Broken: Citrea Aims to Fix it!

Hodl Up: Okay, welcome back to Hodl Up, guys. Today we have Orkun from Citrea with us. Orkun, introduce yourself, man.

Orkun: Hey everyone, Orkun here, co-founder and CEO of Citrea. My background is in engineering, but I've been leading product and strategy at Citrea since we founded it, so it's been a fun couple of years. Citrea is basically the platform for Bitcoin capital markets. Technically, it consists of a few things. It's the first ZK rollup on Bitcoin, and on top of it we have our own native stablecoin, ctUSD, and a bunch of applications in the ecosystem where people can use their stablecoins and Bitcoin to do more with their Bitcoin, whether that's swapping, borrowing against it or using structured products. Citrea is the base layer that enables all of that on Bitcoin.

Hodl Up: For years now, Bitcoin has been branded as digital gold, a hedge against inflation, a store of value. But personally, I've believed since 2017 that Bitcoin could be something more, and I think you're trying to enable that. With all these institutions coming in and this massive narrative that Bitcoin is just a store of value, do you think you can actually change the narrative by making it programmable, like Ethereum or Solana?

Orkun: Like you said, when Satoshi introduced Bitcoin, he or she named the white paper "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." It wasn't about gold. It was a store of value, obviously, but more importantly a medium of exchange, and maybe a unit of account in the future if everyone in the world adopts the technology. That vision changed slightly over the years as more blockchains came in and took other narratives, around decentralized finance, which is all about cash and money. Because of Bitcoin's slow development, which comes from its decentralization of course, it lacked those kinds of activities, and because of the slow block times, it wasn't even feasible to use it as cash the way Satoshi imagined. The technological adoption and improvements on top of it weren't fast enough to get there. So it slowly became digital gold, and I understand why people see it as digital gold and a store of value. But if it's only a store of value, it doesn't make much sense, because the advantage of Bitcoin is that you can not only hold it but also transfer it easily. It's the analogy all the Bitcoin OGs used back in the day: you can hold gold, but transferring it is very painful, and swapping it with someone is very painful. Bitcoin solves those problems, and that's currently overlooked. It's also about the technological infrastructure not enabling it. Even if you believe Bitcoin is a store of value and digital gold, you'll want liquidity against that digital gold. You'll want to borrow cash against it to run your daily finances. If all your earnings go into Bitcoin, you literally have no option other than going to custodians. And there's no point using custodians if you've bought into the digital gold narrative, because then you're back to using something like the money federal governments issue. So even those people have very limited options. They either go through a custodian, deposit their BTC and borrow cash, which breaks the whole purpose, or they go to wrapped BTC or Coinbase BTC, which again are just custodians, to get liquidity against their Bitcoin. So even if you believe in the digital gold narrative, Bitcoin staying exactly as it is doesn't help you at all. What we're building serves even that purpose. It has faster block times, just two seconds, cheaper transactions and, more importantly, an on-chain set of smart contracts that can handle liquidations and LTVs, so you can trustlessly borrow cash against your BTC. That satisfies the digital gold narrative too, but it isn't possible on Bitcoin L1 today. So yes, there's a background to how Bitcoin came to be seen as digital gold, and we believe we can definitely change that. Some people will keep believing it, and we're building for them as well, so they don't have to use custodians and other custodial products to make use of their digital gold.

Hodl Up: At the beginning you said Citrea's mission is Bitcoin capital markets, but from what I saw in earlier documentation, Citrea was more positioned as the place to build anything on Bitcoin. Was that a genuine strategy pivot, or a marketing and packaging change? We've seen a lot of companies change their marketing approach, especially with the institutionalization of crypto: dropping the Web3 terms and using phrases like "capital markets." I want to hear your take.

Orkun: I think it was more of an evolution than just repackaging. We first launched Citrea as a product on February 6, 2024, so over two years ago now, and we started building even before that. When we first launched, we had a set of beliefs about what Citrea would do, and those changed over time, which in my opinion is a good thing. More importantly, Citrea was a blank page. We built the first ZK rollup on Bitcoin, literally the first, with the first trust-minimized bridge ever in production. When we launched the devnet, we needed applications on Citrea, because even if you build the coolest infrastructure on Bitcoin, if there are no applications there are no users, and if there are no users there's no point in building it. We wanted users when we launched mainnet, and the best way to get them is to have genuinely good, UX-first applications that are unique, only possible on Citrea, and use BTC. So our initial marketing was definitely aimed at developers. Shortly after we started that marketing, we launched our incubation program, Citrea Origins. If I'm not mistaken, we work with six teams, and five of them are already in production; only one is still building. Those applications came alive on Citrea mainnet. Looking back now, we have all the primitives ready: a decentralized exchange, trustless money markets, stablecoins and vault products. What that means is that we have an ecosystem covering the primitives of Bitcoin capital markets, where you can use your Bitcoin for multiple things: trading, getting cash against it, or generating yield through structured products and vault strategies. We think that's enough primitives to build on the Bitcoin capital markets narrative. Obviously there's so much more to build. But it was an evolution of the brand: from developer-first, building those applications, to now having the applications and scaling the user base, liquidity and distribution of the platform.

Hodl Up: You've been on mainnet for a few months now, and I understand the technology and infrastructure are working, you've tested them, and the primitives you mentioned are there. But say I'm a startup founder. I want to launch on Bitcoin and see my app prosper: get users and traction, and work well functionally. I come to you and say, convince me to build on Bitcoin instead of Ethereum or Solana, because competition in crypto has never been this high. Pitch me.

Orkun: It's definitely a fair question, and there's a lot of room for other ecosystems to grow besides BTC, because it depends on the narrative. If you want to launch a memecoin, for example, there's been a wave of BRC-20s and Runes on Bitcoin. Memecoins are fun and people can use them. I personally don't use them or try to launch one, but people like them on Solana, so there's definitely a good growth opportunity there. Solana is also building around RWAs, stablecoins and so on. But on Bitcoin, different things matter. If you want to build a privacy application today, Bitcoin is literally the easiest choice, because it's more of a store of value than other assets and networks. No one wants private memecoins to keep in a pool for five days so that they're mixed and anonymous before they sell. That's a matter of seconds or minutes. With Bitcoin, it's people's life savings. Maybe they convert their salaries into Bitcoin and stack it in their wallets, now in self-custody. Those people lack privacy. All their purchases are visible on centralized exchanges, which can be traced back to their cold wallet addresses. That's not only a risk of exploitation but also a real physical security risk, because those exchanges hold addresses, KYC data and everything else. So if you're building a privacy application, you should definitely build on Bitcoin, and Citrea is the only platform where you can build it with minimal trust assumptions, compared to all the other solutions that always have some multisig, trust assumption or custodian in between. That's one side. If you want to build a yield product: stablecoin vaults have taken off over the last two years, but there's a genuine opportunity on Bitcoin, where people aren't very familiar with the strategies that can generate yield on Bitcoin, like different options strategies, basis trading, or borrowing cash and running stablecoin strategies with your Bitcoin without losing the upside. These things are still underexplored compared to what's been built on Ethereum or Solana.

Hodl Up: Since you mentioned privacy, I have a couple of questions. I came across the concept of proof of innocence, which, as I understand it, uses ZK proofs to prove that funds don't originate from sanctioned wallets, so you're compliant while maintaining privacy. At the same time, I feel there are these masterpieces of applied cryptography in this industry, yet regulators seem blind to them and prefer blanket surveillance and protocol-level bans. Are they technologically illiterate about ZK proofs, for example? How does that regulatory reality shape your approach to building privacy features into Citrea's base layer? And a second question: could this be vulnerable to sophisticated bad actors, like the Lazarus Group, off the top of my head?

Orkun: To give some background: proof of innocence is a concept we invented as a company, I think three or four years ago, the summer Tornado Cash got sanctioned. It was actually the first product our development company, Chainway Labs, produced, and our first open-source project as well. Your description is perfect. You have a black box of deposits, similar to Tornado Cash. But with Tornado Cash, anyone can enter and leave the pool, and you can only prove your innocence by revealing all your transactions through a viewing key. After the sanctions, we realized that revealing your transactions to a regulator isn't convincing enough, and it isn't good for you either, because anyone can ask you to do it: if you refuse, you're treated as guilty, and if you comply, you're completely exposed to the public. While thinking about solutions, we realized there's an issue: the government or the Treasury sees a contract holding funds from both innocent users and hackers or complex groups like Lazarus. Even after you withdraw and you're safe, your funds are still mixed. That's one aspect. So we had to solve two things. First, your funds shouldn't be mixed with others' if those incoming deposits come from illicit sources. Second, even if someone claims these are dirty funds, you should be able to say they're not without revealing where your funds came from. Proof of innocence is a solution for that. You can locally prove that your deposits don't come from sanctioned addresses, or any flexible set of addresses, without revealing which deposits are yours, so you stay private but also compliant. This concept changed how people see privacy on Ethereum. After the Tornado sanctions, it was implemented in Railgun quite quickly, about a year later, and Privacy Pools, where we co-authored the white paper, launched recently. Those projects are live today, facilitating privacy on Ethereum in a compliant way. So I definitely think regulators are capable of understanding these concepts. Obviously there's no formal guidance or announcement that these things are completely fine. But in the recent Treasury announcement, they said mixers have legitimate uses for privacy, and my commentary on top of that is that solutions like Privacy Pools are improved versions of mixers. They're definitely not mixers; they're privacy pools with an optional compliance feature that anyone can use if they're under threat from the Treasury or another entity. So I think these are important primitives to build on, and I think regulators definitely understand them and will look more closely at getting them into a completely safe place, similar to DeFi and other smart contracts.

Hodl Up: What I've seen in crypto is that we have so much technology, including zero-knowledge proofs, that isn't being used as it should be, and I think one of the few applications using ZK the way it should is yours, with proof of innocence. Do you think we can apply this to Bitcoin more generally? I don't know if you follow Mert on Twitter. He's been preaching privacy with Zcash, and he started criticizing Bitcoin for being so transparent, pointing to Satoshi saying Bitcoin needs to become more private in the future. With regulation where it is, could we see Bitcoin go fully private through ZK proofs? I think it could get there.

Orkun: I think it's more a question of community and culture than regulation, because the Bitcoin community takes a very detailed approach to everything. Everything needs very strict consensus, and there have been years of discussion before those consensus decisions happened. Privacy is definitely important to almost all Bitcoiners, except corporate Bitcoiners like Saylor and others, who don't see Bitcoin as an asset people use daily, but as something corporations hold in their treasury while people keep buying their equities, preferred shares and whatever. I don't think they really care about this discussion. But the people actually using Bitcoin in daily life definitely advocate for privacy on Bitcoin. The protocol, though, is so primitive that adding a ZK proof verification mechanism is complex without breaking things. And even if you add it, it's not fully private, because with 10-minute block times it still won't be usable. So a bunch of improvements need to be made on Bitcoin L1 to get to full privacy. We could start those discussions in the community, discuss it for six years, and it may happen. But I think the more practical approach is for people to build privacy on Citrea, or similar layers, if there are any with similar trust assumptions, with no custodians and no blacklists where your funds can be seized. Those layers can become opt-in privacy layers where people use their BTC. If the community sees that, say, 10% of Bitcoin is on this layer, in this privacy pool, that shows there's a real consensus that most active Bitcoin users want their Bitcoin to be private, and then those conversations can accelerate. In Bitcoin there's always the question of whether something is a theoretical proposal or whether there's actual consensus around it, and we think the best way to show it is to build those primitives on-chain. If people use them, that demonstrates demand, which can then lead to merging those technologies into Bitcoin L1. But if you're asking my personal opinion, I don't think that's happening in the next six years, minimum. So we should get this going on Citrea and show that there's actual demand for usable Bitcoin privacy.

Hodl Up: That brings me to my next point, because some Bitcoin maxis are crazy stubborn. When Ordinals came around, a lot of Bitcoin maxis were all over the Twitter feed claiming how bad it was for Bitcoin. I'm assuming you've also faced a lot of criticism from maxis who don't want their precious old asset to change at all. How do you deal with them? It should be easier than dealing with XRP maxis, at least.

Orkun: I try to be open to ideas and debate, as long as it's respectful. But there are really cringe things on X, and I sometimes block people, because I realize I talked to the same person six months ago, they didn't do any research and came back with the same points, and then there's no point in discussing. I try to explain things to people. We have a lot of blog posts and articles on X that explain things. I'm not sure it's always worth debating, but it's definitely important that everyone understands that Bitcoin is a permissionless protocol. Everyone runs their own nodes, and if something can get mined, it will be mined. There's no way to erase it from history or stop it from happening. If a miner can include something in a block, someone will find a way to do it. That happened with Ordinals. It was completely a side effect of Taproot. I think everyone accepts that now. There's no way to revert that change without breaking things, and no way to prevent it without changing anything, so there's nothing we can do about it. And that's what makes Bitcoin good: no one can alter the rules as they wish, so we can be sure our money is safe. Ordinals are one of those side effects of Taproot. But another side effect of Taproot is BitVM, the technology that enables how Citrea verifies ZK proofs on Bitcoin today. So it's actually a good thing: a technology that enables ZK verification on Bitcoin. Ordinals and BitVM look like two completely separate things, but they come from the same source. And Citrea itself is built on both of these primitives: you put your rollup data on Bitcoin, which we were inspired to do by Ordinals, and you verify the proofs on Bitcoin, which is what we built with BitVM. So changes always have side effects, not always bad and not always good, and everyone should expect that nothing can be done about it; it will always happen. I tend to ignore most of these conversations nowadays because I'm so tired of them. But generally we try to respect what exists today and what we can do. We built on the inscription primitive to post rollup data. We could have tried to change Bitcoin to have a separate blob space, like Ethereum, so rollups could be cheaper. But we said, okay, this is what exists today; we'll just build with it. If there's demand, the community will understand that this kind of change might help developers and users of the network. If not, we don't need to spend years on that change. So our general principle is to build with whatever Bitcoin has today, and not ask for or wait for changes that could block the development and adoption of the protocol.

Hodl Up: Even in crypto, although we're such an innovative industry, I think people are scared of change, and that's what's happening with Bitcoin maxis too. But I think change is good, especially when we're building something new.

Orkun: I was going to say, the good thing about Bitcoin is that it can change, and it should, but it's also good that there are people asking questions and making sure every development goes in the right direction. Unfortunately, that slows things down, and sometimes you have to deal with people who have no clue but want to talk. Still, it's good that we're protected, unlike other ecosystems where a foundation can push a change and everyone must adapt or get kicked out of the delegation program. There's no such thing in Bitcoin. You have to convince users, miners and exchanges to make a change, so everyone makes sure the change is top quality. Even though there have been side effects, with Taproot and SegWit, those changes happened by consensus, and that's how it should be.

Hodl Up: You mentioned you're building everything on Bitcoin right now. What about more complex markets, and even governance models like futarchy, or prediction markets, which are really hot right now? Do you think we're close to seeing those directly on Citrea, this year or next? I think we need more competition. Right now it's just two or three players taking all the volume, and if we had one on Bitcoin, I think we have enough whales to take the whole industry.

Orkun: That's true, and I think what you're describing is true for the crypto ecosystem in general. I saw a post from a DeFi founder saying that in most DeFi verticals, the top two winners take most of the share: Tether and Circle in stablecoins, and similarly in smart contract chains. It's happening in prediction markets too, with Polymarket and Kalshi leading volume and user counts. But I think there's more to build in prediction markets than binary markets. One of the teams we supported in our accelerator is called Signals. With them, you can bet on the Bitcoin price in ranges instead of binary options. You can choose that Bitcoin will close today somewhere between $65,000 and $75,000, and based on the distribution of other bets, you have an outcome. If you win, you get that payout; if you lose, it's like a regular prediction market and other users win. But unlike a binary prediction market, they have a curve that adjusts dynamically based on other users' predictions. I think unique things like that matter more than building a binary prediction market that just happens to use Bitcoin. I don't think that's a big enough change to go mainstream. But with something more novel, like what I described, you have a better chance of winning, and being powered by Bitcoin makes it even better, because people use it and pay fees directly into the Bitcoin ecosystem. On governance, there's no active project that I know of working on the cutting edge of governance. I really like futarchy. I've tried to follow it, and I still don't think enough people vote on the proposals, but it's at least a good experiment showing how it can be done differently from regular governance. So you can do all of these things on Citrea. We have limited bandwidth, so we work closely with a select set of teams, but anyone can deploy. We try to support unique things powered by Bitcoin that bring in users organically, so those users become Bitcoin users without even noticing.

Hodl Up: I want to ask a question, and I apologize if it sounds ignorant or arrogant, but some of the best use cases I've seen in crypto come from founders who have been exposed to developing countries or experienced hyperinflation. I know you said you're from Turkey. Has that affected your decision-making and the strategy behind Citrea and its uses?

Orkun: It definitely has. My crypto journey started with something very relevant to this. When I started college, I was funding my music education through an on-chain funding platform based in Turkey that used a Turkish stablecoin, on Ethereum or zkSync Lite or something like that, to transact. That was literally my first real-world use case of crypto, and it existed because Turkey is an emerging country without a proper, effective donation system; intermediaries take big cuts and so on. So my personal story starts there. And growing up in such a country, you see that a store of value is not what the government prints and gives you. I'm sure it's similar where you are, but most Turkish people keep buying gold and putting it at home. Not in a bank account, not tokenized gold or anything: they literally buy gold, take it home and put it in a safe, because over the years they've experienced some of the worst devaluations of an asset, going back maybe 50 years. So they keep holding gold, and Bitcoin and other store-of-value assets provide a really good alternative, where they can do it even more safely, with a proper inheritance framework and everything that works in real life, and with much more protection from physical attacks. So there's a real opportunity to grow the store-of-value narrative in the region first, and after that, definitely the medium-of-exchange narrative, because that's the secondary effect: once you have a better asset to hold, why not spend it, instead of trying to get another asset that you can't hold because it loses value all the time? So yes, it affected how I got into crypto, how I see the world, and also how we came to believe more in Bitcoin, its functionality and its values.

Hodl Up: Do you think Western crypto teams have misconceptions about user behavior in countries with high inflation? Last year we were at Solana Crossroads and saw a lot of very degen-style products, with very high but unstable APYs. And I kept thinking this wouldn't work for Turkish people, because I had the feeling that people there are more risk-averse and prefer something stable, since they experience high inflation.

Orkun: In 2021, I remember, you could buy a full meal in Turkey for less than €1. Now it's at least €20 or something, so it's much more expensive. But yes, you're right. I think most Western-based teams don't really understand the problems in other parts of the world. I'm excluding the teams that do; they do a great job, definitely more than Citrea has so far, since we just started. But most of the teams we talk to aren't aware of these problems. It's funny: at a conference in Singapore last year, I had two back-to-back meetings. In one, we talked about how mortgages could be on-chain, so Americans could use on-chain rails for their mortgages. That's definitely a problem, and maybe there's a solution. But it's a completely Western way of looking at things. In the other, I was talking with one of our team members about a team from the Philippines building on Citrea, working on text-based Bitcoin transactions, where you can text your friends and the Bitcoin transaction goes along with the message, without needing cellular data, because cellular data isn't stable in most regions there. So those are two completely different sets of problems. One is completely focused on financing, lenders and borrowers; on the other side, people just want to transact peer-to-peer using cash, which is Bitcoin in our case. Sometimes they converge. Some of these regions use the dollar as a store of value, so a stable yield account makes sense. But in the West, the problems are about tokenizing equities and trading them 24/7, which isn't really a priority for most other regions of the world. So there are two, or maybe more, different sets of problems to solve. Maybe they're equally important, but they require different expertise and different research.

Hodl Up: It's funny, because I've noticed this with many people I've talked to about this issue. Outside the West, the applications with the most users are focused on making life easier for the individual: peer-to-peer transactions, or access to USDT or a stronger currency through their phone. It's really interesting to me. Now I'm going to change the subject completely and talk about Chainway Labs. We mentioned the degen culture we've had in crypto for at least three years now. Chainway Labs is more academic, more serious. You build things that are genuinely complex to build, if you know what I mean. How do you fit into the current state of the market? Is it hard? What's your approach to appealing to the industry?

Orkun: I'd say most DeFi products are also complex and important, and they had to be built, which matters for Citrea too. What we're building is more complex at the infrastructure level because of the mathematics involved, ZK proofs, Bitcoin scripts and the codebase. There are surely even more complex protocols out there. This has been our focus because it's literally the primitive you need to build applications on Bitcoin. We had to build it; there was no workaround. So we built it, but we definitely want to refocus on the application layer too, whether that's DeFi or privacy. We want to be more involved and talk to users, rather than just being the infrastructure layer that does nothing else. So yes, we were more on that side, but I think we also had a good run on the ecosystem and marketing side: getting all these teams to build on Citrea, getting them live on mainnet, and trying to perfect their products through user experience improvements and marketing and growth strategies. So we've already done more on the user side, but we want to be more involved there. It's a long-term view for us. We spent almost three years building this infrastructure. We worked on our stablecoin for a long time, and it launched together with mainnet, so now we also have distribution and an on-ramp for the protocol. The third step is to look at the applications, improve them, talk to more users and onboard them to Citrea. It's a goal that might take 10 to 20 years to even partially achieve. We had some short-term product ideas before starting Citrea, but we realized that building on Bitcoin and bringing this primitive to life is more beneficial to everyone else, even more than to us.

Hodl Up: What's the best criticism you've received from a Bitcoin holder or user? Was there a time you thought, this person has a point, let's implement that?

Orkun: On the technical side there have probably been several, which I don't remember right now. On usability, there have definitely been questions like: a Bitcoiner who wants to be safe stays on Bitcoin L1, and a Bitcoiner who wants yield uses Ethereum, so who are you building for? That was one of the criticisms we got. But I think it's just not a good idea to leave everything as it is until wrapped BTC or Coinbase BTC blows up and people's Bitcoin holdings are lost. Wrapped BTC holds a significant amount of Bitcoin right now, and it could be lost, because it's held under a custodian key that could get lost or seized at any time, or whatever could happen in the US. That's not an issue today, but it doesn't mean people won't realize that this is even safer than wrapped BTC, Coinbase BTC or other custodians, and start using it. As we develop more liquidity and applications, a safety-minded Bitcoin L1 user can also say: this rollup has been live for three years, it's audited, it has ZK proof infrastructure where no one can alter transactions, so it's mathematically sound, there have been no issues for three years, and lots of people use it, so I can use it too. So again, it's a long-term goal, and definitely not as easy in the short term as other opportunities we could have built, because it sits between those two categories: important in the long term, but not as obvious in the short term as building memecoins or DeFi.

Hodl Up: Which brings me to my next point, because I was going to ask who you consider your true competitors. Other Bitcoin L2s, or Ethereum L2s competing for Bitcoin liquidity?

Orkun: Not other Bitcoin L2s. There aren't many of them, unlike last year's boom, when there were a lot of so-called Bitcoin L2s, none of which even reached mainnet. And not Ethereum L2s either, but Ethereum itself, because that's where most BTC liquidity sits, most of the Coinbase BTC liquidity, outside the Bitcoin ecosystem. So our first goal is to bring those bitcoins back to Bitcoin through Citrea, so people don't lose the option to use DeFi with their Bitcoin but don't have to hand their keys to a custodian to do it. Second, there are a lot of people in DeFi, and I used to be one of them, who use DeFi but not with their Bitcoin, because they don't want to use wrapped Bitcoin. Citrea gives them a platform to bring their Bitcoin and use it in DeFi the way they do with other assets. Maybe in the long run they won't even need those other assets, because they can do everything with their Bitcoin. And third, definitely, Bitcoin holders who don't want to do DeFi but can still do more with their Bitcoin: better multisigs, better family accounts, better inheritance frameworks, better spending accounts with spending limits, account abstraction and passkeys, so they don't even need a seed phrase. Those are our users, and you can derive the competitors from there.

Hodl Up: I'm going to spin the conversation 180 degrees again, because I want to go deeper on Citrea's mainnet. How is it going? What challenges have you seen since going live?

Orkun: As you know, market conditions are the best... But we believe that's a good opportunity for us, because it lets us talk to users one by one. They aren't coming in by the billions trying to bot or farm it, where we couldn't even make sense of the analytics or the users. Now we can actually talk with users, see their feedback and implement it. When we launched, over a month ago, we shipped at least five updates to our bridging page in the first week, because every day we received feedback that something wasn't working properly, was missing or could be improved. So we kept improving it and pushing to production. Those user interactions have been really important, because after a while you go blind. We used our own product for two years with basically no one else using it or giving feedback, and when we went to mainnet we realized we'd done a bunch of silly things we could have fixed in minutes before going to production. But you can't find those without third-party users, on different operating systems, in different parts of the world, with different connection speeds and, more importantly, different habits, using the product. So we've been improving it a lot, and the same goes for our ecosystem projects, which have been taking our feedback and user feedback and iterating very quickly. Liquidity is now bootstrapping completely organically. I think around 30 BTC has been bootstrapped, and more than a million dollars' worth of ctUSD has been minted, mostly by Ethereum users with USDC. On the other side, we've been working with institutions for a long time, and that also takes time. We're onboarding more asset managers and credit providers to use structured products and money markets secured by the first trust-minimized BTC, to generate yield on their stablecoins in the form of ctUSD. We've been working on that a lot, and it's definitely accelerating. We've gotten ecosystem projects onto mainnet, such as Satsuma, Centra, Signals, Selfi and, recently, Crest, the privacy application, which is in closed beta right now. On top of that, we've launched structured products with top asset managers, such as the one we launched with Kira on Accountable, which offers a basis trading strategy on Bitcoin. So Bitcoin users can now access institutional-grade yield with their BTC, which wasn't available to them before. That's what we're working on. We still have plenty of other things to build and improve, but we're working at maximum capacity for our bandwidth.

Hodl Up: There's a saying that bear markets are for building and shipping, and I think you're actually doing that.

Orkun: That's always been us, bull or bear. But being in a bear market definitely lets us be more direct with users and their feedback, which is good in the early stages of a product.

Hodl Up: I know it won't be easy. The curve is quite steep when you think about it, because every investor you ask about their strategy says to DCA Bitcoin or hold Bitcoin and you'll be fine in the long term. So besides the obvious, that people need to understand Bitcoin has use cases other than sitting in a cold wallet: what does the Bitcoin app layer look like in five years? What's the dominant user story?

Orkun: In the Bitcoin ecosystem, a few things matter. Bitcoin itself, and the stablecoin that gives you access to both the Bitcoin ecosystem and the fiat ecosystem at the same time. But there are also a bunch of other assets associated with Bitcoin that aren't on-chain: treasury companies, their equities and preferred shares, like Stretch, which everyone is talking about right now, and other offerings like hash rate derivatives and hash rate markets, where you can buy and sell hash rate, or lend to Bitcoin miners collateralized by their future mining rewards. Those are completely off-chain today, because the Bitcoin ecosystem can't support them and other ecosystems are busy with their own things. There's no unified platform where you can use all these primitives to generate yield on your Bitcoin, get financing against it or trade it. So it's about all of that, and there are still many products to build beyond DEXs and money markets. That's what we're focused on bringing on-chain. And why couldn't there be an application on Citrea that accumulates BTC from fees and offers something similar to Stretch, where holders invest a fixed amount and get a fixed yield derived from the project's Bitcoin holdings? These things can be implemented in smart contracts, and they can be operationally more efficient than off-chain entities and equities. So there's still a lot to build, and that's what we'll focus on for the next five years.

Hodl Up: You mentioned trading hash rate. What about prediction markets on hash rate?

Orkun: That's also a physical bet you'd be making. If you predict it'll go down, you might not buy a mining machine now and buy it later instead, for example. So you could definitely build a derivative of a derivative there, in the form of a prediction market.

Hodl Up: I agree. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Personally, I enjoyed this conversation a lot, and we're glad we got to have it. You explained a lot of things I wasn't aware of. And to any traditional Bitcoin maxi in the comments who disagrees: please do your due diligence before attacking us.

Orkun: No, it's good to have discussions. If anyone wants to debate these things, I'm always available on X, so feel free to tag me or DM me.

Hodl Up: But debate leads to change, and that's something they don't want. Well, thank you so much once again.