From "Bitcoin Killer" to Collaboration: What Citrea Changes

Citrea has just launched on mainnet - an EVM rollup built on Bitcoin. This is a very important milestone for the healthy, long-term development of the crypto ecosystem.

Originally, the EVM was supposed to be a "Bitcoin killer", offering features that Bitcoin itself could not provide. Instead, Bitcoin survived, thrived, and remained the foundation of the entire crypto market. But to this day, many people still see Bitcoin and EVM networks as competitors - almost as enemies.

Until now, the most well-known attempt to bridge these two worlds was Rootstock, an EVM-compatible Bitcoin sidechain. It has been live for eight years and works perfectly well, yet it never achieved mass adoption. It seems that Bitcoiners generally do not feel a strong need for the features available in EVM networks, while EVM application developers are not particularly interested in deploying on a network where Bitcoin is the native asset.

Now we are seeing another attempt - and I genuinely wish success to the team behind it.

In reality, making Bitcoin and EVM networks work together should not be that difficult. On rabbit.io, users regularly swap BTC for EVM-based tokens and back. Exchanging wrapped Bitcoin across EVM networks such as Ethereum, Polygon, and BNB Chain is also consistently in demand.

I hope that Citrea will also see the emergence of assets that users will find genuinely useful.