BitVM creator: Galaxy Ventures-backed Citrea’s marketing is ‘misleading’

Robin Linus, the author of BitVM whitepaper, slammed Citrea stating that the project’s marketing is “full of overclaims and misleading statements.”

Bitcoin zero-knowledge rollup Citrea, which recently secured $2.7 million in a seed funding round led by Galaxy Ventures, has come under fire for allegedly misleading the public with its marketing campaign.

Robin Linus, the creator of the BitVM whitepaper, describes a process of enabling Ethereum-like smart-contract functionality to Bitcoin, voicing his concerns in an X post on May 30, saying Citrea’s promotional materials are “full of overclaims and misleading statements.”

While the details remain slim, Linus said that Citrea’s marketing efforts falsely imply a closer affiliation with the BitVM project to attract investors and attention.

Orkun Kılıç, co-founder of Chainway Labs, the team behind Citrea, responded to the allegations, saying that Linus’s statements “overshadowed” his work. Kılıç emphasized that Citrea’s marketing accurately reflects its developments and specifications, highlighting their team’s expertise in zero-knowledge technology and previous innovations.

“We have a background in ZK and have invented different products like PoI and PP. We don’t need any affiliations and have never needed them.”

Orkun Kılıç

Citrea wants to build an execution layer atop the Bitcoin blockchain by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs to scale the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic methods by which one party can prove to another that they know a value or possess certain information without revealing the information itself. They have been deployed in cryptocurrency for enhancing privacy and scalability, with notable implementations including zk-SNARKs in Zcash for private transactions and zk-rollups in Ethereum for efficient and scalable transaction processing.

According to the project’s technical documentation, Citrea proofs “are inscribed in Bitcoin and optimistically verified via BitVM.”

In February, Citrea raised nearly $3 million in funding from multiple investors, including Galaxy Digital’s Galaxy Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Eric Wall, and Anurag Arjun.

At the time of the funding announcement, crypto venture capital firm Pantera Capital forecasted a substantial opportunity for the Bitcoin network in decentralized finance (defi). Pantera suggested that Bitcoin could potentially attract up to half a trillion dollars in value by enabling decentralized applications (dApps), making Bitcoin-based defi a significant contender in the crypto market.

Currently, Ethereum dominates the defi landscape, hosting the majority of related activities. According to Pantera Capital, decentralized applications on Ethereum have historically accounted for 8% to 50% of Ethereum’s market capitalization, with the current figure at approximately 25%. Applying these proportions to Bitcoin, analysts at Pantera project that the network could draw around $225 billion in value through Bitcoin-based dApps.