Citrea (CTR): The Bitcoin ZK Rollup

Citrea is the latest Bitcoin scaling solution to launch its token.

Martin Gaspar

Senior Crypto Market Strategist

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Citrea is the latest Bitcoin scaling solution to come to market. Its CTR token went live last week on major exchanges and follows the protocol’s mainnet launch in January 2026. At its core, Citrea enables smart contracts on Bitcoin, which can be a considerable unlock considering a large portion of BTC is not actively utilized beyond holding. Illustrating this point, data from Glassnode shows 60% of BTC supply has not moved in at least a year. For BTC, part of the reason may be a strong preference from BTC holders to stay on BTC-native rails. Citrea addresses this in part by building its L2 on BTC and effectively using BTC for gas.

What to Know

Citrea is a fully EVM equivalent ZK L2 that uses BTC for settlement and data availability. It uses Citrea BTC (cBTC) as its native gas token and the CTR token for protocol governance. It has block times of 2 seconds with a gas limit of 10M.

Given the protocol’s relatively early stage (its mainnet has only been live for a few months), it currently relies on a single sequencer, although is exploring moving to a decentralized sequencer network in the future. The protocol has an independent Security Council (3-of-5 multisig) for bridging, vault operations, and system upgrades.

cBTC is native BTC that is bridged to Citrea. cBTC leverages a self-described trust-minimized bridge (‘Clementine’), built on the BitVM, due to its 1-of-N trust assumption that relies on only at least 1 honest verifier. This compares to other bridges for wrapped BTC that may depend on multisigs or on separate chains/consensus.

It also has its ctUSD stablecoin, which has a $24M market cap as of May 26, 2026, per CoinGecko. It describes this as a fiat-backed, regulatory-compliant stablecoin. Issued by MoonPay, it serves as the default stablecoin on the Citrea network. Having its own native stablecoin early on helps bootstrap its DeFi ecosystem and helps accelerate broader utility (such as payments) on its network. Thanks to this product, it does not necessarily need to wait for CDP DeFi protocols to go live or require the onboarding of other stablecoins to help support its apps.

Tokenomics

CTR is used as a coordination asset in the Citrea ecosystem. Holders stake CTR to receive xCTR, a non-transferable token that grants voting power over the Citrea Governance Treasury and the Citrea Network. xCTR holders vote on treasury allocations, council selection, and network operations.

Citrea utilizes a dual treasury model. Its governance treasury is controlled by xCTR holders and manages liquidity incentives, council selection and payments, as well as infrastructure provider selection and payments. The foundation treasury manages R&D and ecosystem grants as well as operations and strategic initiatives.

CTR has a fixed supply of 10B tokens, with no inflation above this level. Approximately 35% of the supply is unlocked at launch, although circulating supply at launch is only 12%. The difference in circulating vs unlocked supply is from tokens earmarked for Ecosystem Growth and R&D.

Building Activity

With both mainnet and the token live, Citrea now faces the task of growing activity on its network. On this front, Citrea is working on building out its DeFi ecosystem, such as with Morpho and UltraYield. In addition to its Morpho instance, other DeFi protocols already live on Citrea include Satsuma (DEX) and Zentra Finance (Lending). Citrea has $12M in TVL across its DeFi ecosystem so far, which it notes is organic and pre-incentive. Activity stands to grow as CTR incentives go live.

Earlier in May, Citrea announced $50M+ in planned liquidity commitments from institutional investors (to take the form of cBTC and ctUSD) and a ctUSD Pre-Deposit Vault to help support Bitcoin capital activities on its chain, with the vault eligible for CTR rewards. The capital is slated to be deployed across the Citrea ecosystem including lending markets (Morpho and Zentra), DEXes, and cBTC structured yield products.

Relative Metrics (Illustrative)

As of May 29, Citrea trades at $163M FDV, below peer Stacks, but above Bitlayer and Mezo. Citrea has more TVL ($12M) relative to newer BTC L2s (Bitlayer at $0.5M and Botanix at $0.2M). Despite this, CTR trades at the lowest MC/TVL of its peer set at 1.6X, which may reflect the trading dynamics of a new token launch rather than its adoption. Peers STX and BTR both trade at considerably higher MC/TVL multiples (3.6X and 10.6X, respectively).

What’s Next

As Citrea continues to build its ecosystem in the weeks after its token launch, we should monitor its ability to gain traction with native BTC users, as well as its ability to service institutional liquidity through blue-chip ecosystem partners/offerings like Morpho.