Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
Each week, I sit down with the innovators and builders shaping the future of crypto and web3.
Growth isn’t a sprint; it’s a process—built gradually, step by step, block by block.
Let’s build something incredible, together. All onchain.
Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
Orkun Kilic--Citrea: The First Bitcoin ZK Rollup
Summary
In this conversation, Orkun Kilic, co-founder of Citrea, shares his journey into the world of cryptocurrency, detailing how he transitioned from skepticism to becoming a key player in the Bitcoin ecosystem. He explains the concept of ZK rollups and their significance in making Bitcoin programmable, addressing the technical challenges faced in building on Bitcoin. Orkun discusses the potential for DeFi on Bitcoin and the importance of user experience in driving adoption. He emphasizes the need for a robust developer ecosystem to support innovative applications built on Citrea, aiming to enhance the usability of Bitcoin for everyday users. In this conversation, Orkun Kilic from Citrea discusses the innovative features of their platform, including the use of Bitcoin as a guest token and the unique smart contract capabilities. He emphasizes the importance of building a strong developer community through initiatives like the Origins program and hacker houses. The discussion also touches on branding strategies, addressing skepticism about Bitcoin's programmability, and the lessons learned in balancing technical development with community engagement.
Takeaways
— Orkun’s journey into crypto began with skepticism about Bitcoin.
— ZK rollups are crucial for making Bitcoin programmable.
— Building on Bitcoin presents unique technical challenges.
— Collaboration with other ZK projects is essential for growth.
— DeFi on Bitcoin has immense potential due to its large user base.
— User experience is key to driving Bitcoin adoption.
— Citrea aims to abstract the complexities of Bitcoin for users.
— The first ZK rollup on Bitcoin sets a precedent for future projects.
— Native applications are prioritized for better user experience.
— Citrea is focused on creating applications that meet real user needs. Citrea deploys smart contracts on Bitcoin using EIP 7720.
— The security of Citrea is closely tied to Bitcoin’s decentralization.
— Citrea aims to support high-value applications, not meme coins.
— The Origins program focuses on incubating early-stage projects.
— Hacker houses foster community and developer engagement.
— Branding is crucial for creating an ecosystem around Citrea.
— Authentic community engagement is more valuable than mere metrics.
— Skepticism about Bitcoin’s capabilities can be addressed through organic growth.
— Balancing technical development with community building is essential.
— Building something influential requires targeted user engagement.
Chapters
(00:00) Orkun’s Journey into Crypto
(02:58) Understanding ZK Rollups and Bitcoin
(05:59) The Technical Challenges of Building on Bitcoin
(09:03) Collaborations and Partnerships in the ZK Space
(11:51) The Potential of DeFi on Bitcoin
(14:57) User Experience and Adoption Strategies
(17:58) Building a Developer Ecosystem for Citrea
(26:33) Building on Citrea: The Role of Smart Contracts
(29:04) Understanding Citrea’s Data Availability and Security
(31:29) Innovative Applications and Partnerships in Citrea
(34:05) The Origins Program: Incubating Future Projects
(35:58) Hacker Houses: Engaging Developers and Building Community
(38:52) Branding and Community Building in the Crypto Space
(43:03) Addressing Skepticism: The Long-Term Vision for Citrea
(50:12) Lessons Learned: Balancing Technical and Community Growth
Follow me @shmula on X for upcoming episodes and to get in touch with me.
Orkun Kun, co-founder of Citrea, welcome. Hey, hey Peter, how are you? I am excited to have more Bitcoin projects on the podcast and Citrea is one of those really promising ones. Let's start there. Well, actually, let's start with your origin story because I think people's backgrounds inform what they end up doing in their entrepreneurial journey. And so how'd you get into crypto? Maybe we can begin there. Yeah, it sounds great. So how did I get into crypto? It was actually quite recent. Like it's obviously not recent now, but it was five, six years ago. So my brother was always telling me about Bitcoin mining. He was just buying and selling Bitcoin from I think 2016. But I thought like, bro, it's scam. Just like forget about it. Don't do anything like dangerous. Don't use my credit card, et cetera. It was the beginning of my journey. But once I get into college in 2019, I realized actually like some people are developing stuff around it because I studied computer engineering. I was also very close to software development, distributed systems. And I realized this is actually like a technology, not just like a scam trading stuff. And the first hands-on experience of me was one of... One day I was sitting at home, my WhatsApp group just pinged and someone from my class pinged pinged the group basically saying that, I'm attending a blockchain hackathon. Is there anyone who know how to write smart contracts? And back then I was doing internship for some venture capital companies and like some fintech companies. And there I got interested to solidity, learned a bit about like how to write NFT contracts, et cetera. And I just said to him, okay, I will come with you. I know a bit. And that was my kind of first hands-on deep dive crypto stuff because before that I was just fully isolated doing stuff on my own. Don't have a Twitter account. Don't know what's Ethereum and other stuff. Just know Solidity as a programming language. But yeah, later that guy that pinged the group become my CTO at the moment in this company. After the tech at home, we worked together in some companies. had a smart contract development. was doing quant and like trading stuff in general, algorithmic trading, MEV. And then after that, we got together with two more of our college friends and four of us co-founded our company, current company called Chainway Labs. It's the company that's building Citrea. And yeah, maybe I can go from there if you want, but yeah, in the early days of the company, we built around privacy on Ethereum. We worked on something called Proof of Innocence, then become Privacy Pools, which recently launched. We helped protocol development stuff. But yeah, lately, I think two years ago, Ordinals come to Bitcoin and then we got more and more interested to Bitcoin. And that basically lighted our journey in Bitcoin. And after that, there were some other projects and there was Citrea. And for the last almost two years, we have been just working on Citrea and our stuff. Maybe I could give you a maybe I could just tease that up a little bit. So you've described Citrea as Bitcoin's first ZK roll up. So for listeners who aren't tech experts, how would you explain in simple terms what that means and why making Bitcoin more programmable is important or a big deal? Yeah, the ZK rollup is basically how we make Bitcoin programmable. But in ideal world, it's not the important piece, but currently it's important because so far people think Bitcoin is a very limited blockchain where you can only send and receive Bitcoin and that's the whole function, right? That caused some issues. The mainly the lack of scalability around this payments and customer's ability led to use of custodians. In the last cycle we saw BlockFi, Celsius and others basically that you can deposit your Bitcoin, it's very easy to use but you don't actually own the Bitcoin in that platforms. That was the one weakness of Bitcoin and the second is people wanted to use their Bitcoin in DeFi and then they have to move their Bitcoin over Ethereum which still uses custodians like Wrapped Bitcoin, like TBTC, right? They use Bitgo, so they actually trust another company to hold their Bitcoin which still involves the trust. But over these years, like the last 10 years, show us that people actually want to use their Bitcoin. Buy and hold is one strategy. But even if holding on Bitcoin is really hard, have you ever used like a Bitcoin wallet? It's really painful to use those wallets. And then we realized, okay, what if we can actually make Bitcoin more usable? That is tied to be making Bitcoin more programmable, because if you are making it programmable, then you can have account abstraction, like very easy to use smart contract accounts. spending limits, social recovery, those kind of stuff can be added on top. And then we started researching ways around how to make Bitcoin programmable. And basically a ZK rollup is the best way of doing it because it doesn't involve any trust assumption rather than the math. ZK basically allows us to mathematically prove that something happened on Citrea and then verify that results on Bitcoin, which means If you are already trusting Bitcoin, which means if you have a Bitcoin node, then this doesn't include any other trust assumption. It's just pure math that you are doing and then Bitcoin becomes programmable without changing Bitcoin, without introducing more complexities. We just built the system. You transact on top, you do DeFi on top, you hold your Bitcoin there, you have very advanced social recovery and other features and everything you do is actually getting verified on Bitcoin. So it is almost the same level of security with Bitcoin and basically ZKallop is how we are doing this, all of the stuff. And what's the technical, I guess, I'm familiar with Ethereum rollups and in the Ethereum space, there's rollup as a service becomes a really important part of the infrastructure. That's why it's so easy to create a rollup because it takes five to 10 minutes to create a rollup through these services. What is creating a rollup like on Bitcoin? What is that like? Yeah, it's painful. It took us like more than two years to actually come to this stage. We are still on test net. We are getting very close to main net by the way, but it's a really hard process because building a roll up, the CK roll up involves two process. One is the roll up that actually needs to push their blocks to the Bitcoin L1, like any L1, any roll up on any L1 needs to push their data. to the underlying chain. And the second is underlying chain needs to verify the proofs so that Bitcoin can move between the L1 and L2. So these two advancements actually happened in the last two years in Bitcoin that enabled Citrea. The first one was Ordinals. With Ordinals, we realized we can actually use Bitcoin blocks to embed arbitrary data. In the early days, it was GPEGs. People were putting Taproot wizards. People were putting any image they want to Bitcoin L1. But that time we realized those images are just bytes, they're just numbers. And what if we can actually put a rollup data instead of an image to the Bitcoin blocks? That is the first kind of prerequisite of building a rollup. And we could actually satisfy that now with all the other things happened around Bitcoin, mainly the Taproot upgrade in 2021 and then the invention of Ordinals in 2023. When you say roll up data, talking about the you you push the hash to a Bitcoin block. Is that correct? not the hash actually, the full compressed transaction data. All the rollups push their all transaction data to any data available to layer. For some rollups, it's Ethereum, for some rollups, it's Avail, for some rollups, it's Celestia, and for us, it's Bitcoin. Yes. way to think about this. The data availability is on Bitcoin. I see. Okay. That's fascinating. And how is the... Okay. That's the first piece. The second piece is the verifying the proof. Okay. that is happening through something called BitVM. That paper also released one and half years ago. A Bitcoin researcher called Robin Linus, he released a paper basically showing that we can actually verify a proof on Bitcoin bits by bits. Because the whole proof verification is not small enough to fit into Bitcoin blocks. But he realized we can actually connect them bit by bit, just like a circuit. off chain and then verify the necessary parts on chain so that this gives us a ZK verification. And then the second iteration of BitVM called BitVM 2 released last year. And then after BitVM 2, all the contributors around BitVM said that, okay, guys, we are pushing separately. Let's form an alliance. And right now there is something called BitVM Alliance, which we are one of the founding members of it, is pushing the production-ready implementation for the BitVM. And BitVM is essentially a... a ZK verification algorithm on Bitcoin, which is very complex, involves a lot of signature algorithms, a lot of fraud proofs, but it works. We actually, think by the time this is uploaded, we may release on test net. We actually got the releases, we are now deploying it. So it will be our first time Bitcoin layer two will get verified on Bitcoin using ZK. That's the advantage of like this, the main thing that B2VM provides. And it's definitely one of the two things that was necessary to create this roll up. And that's now available. It's also audit ready. So it will be production ready in couple of months. I've been speaking with many ZK projects in the last few months. Just in the last couple of weeks, I met with Uma Roy from Succinct, Rob Viglioni from ZKVerify, Polyhedra, many others. And I wonder if Citrea could work with any of these other projects, even though they're not in the Bitcoin ecosystem, but they're still ZK projects. exactly. We are actually working with one. We are working with RISC Zero. So, RISC Zero, Succinct and other alternatives, they provide the proving infrastructure, right? They provide the proof. The Bitcoin is just a verification and BitVM provides the verification. So, we are actually composing with all the other tooling builds besides Bitcoin. Our rollup code base is a Rust code base that we can easily prove in RISC Zero. So we are using it. And finally, our roll up is using Ethereum Virtual Machine, which is just EVM, Solidity Smart Contract, Metamask Wallet. You can just use all of these two links. We prove it in RISC Zero and verify on Bitcoin. So it's actually pretty modular and composable that we can use all the other elements not built on specifically for Bitcoin. And just with a single ZK proof, we can actually bond that technology to Bitcoin and make it available for Bitcoiners. Well, what about ZK Verify? I mean, they're in the job of verifying proofs. Could they be a potential partner? I'm just thinking because I just met with them and... Yeah, I don't know the technical stuff behind the project, but in general, the verification is where we get the security. And verifying on Bitcoin means that we are getting security from Bitcoin because all the Bitcoin full nodes is actually verifying the proof now. So that's kind of like the main advantage for using Bitcoin as verification layer. I think if we switch to another verification layer, we won't be a Bitcoin roll up anymore. We will be something else. which will diverge from what use case we imagine is the best for us to build in the space. Yeah, I am really excited for this, you what people are calling the Bitcoin Renaissance. know, Bitcoin is, you know, I mean, that's that's where it all started. And that's where I think I think as it becomes more programmable with projects like Citrea and we unlock the potential for DeFi on Bitcoin, it could really grow the crypto space, the Web3 space. Yeah, in general, think about Ethereum, right? People are building projects on Ethereum, which uses Ethereum as collateral, let's say stablecoin projects, and they grow actually like quite big, like millions of dollars. And now map that same thing to Bitcoin. It's crazy big assets like compared to Ethereum and like the rest of the crypto, the dominance today is I think around 60%, which means the whole crypto just represents two-thirds of Bitcoin and Ethereum is even lower. in that scale and Ethereum DeFi TVL is much much lower than that. So once you map the exact same infrastructure like we are building to Bitcoin, the potential liquidity, the potential user base you are getting is very very large. Like it's not even comparable with Ethereum Solana or whatever chain. Yeah. What do you think? So let's talk about that for a quick second. I met with Lombard and Babylon and other projects in the Bitcoin DeFi space, BTCFi. And one kind of psychological aspect of BTC holders is that they don't want to do anything with their Bitcoin. They hold Bitcoin and then they store it in their cold storage and they don't want to do anything with it. On the one hand, potential for DeFi on, if Bitcoin becomes part, a major part of DeFi, you know, we can see the TVL really, really growing massively. But at the same time, there's kind of a psychological aspect to this because a lot of BTC holders don't want to touch their Bitcoin. So how do you think about that as you kind of approach your go-to-market strategy? Yeah, I think it's an assumption because most more local Bitcoiners that you see on Twitter on conferences are maxis and you don't always know who are the biggest Bitcoin holders, right? Orkun who are like those people are not coming to the conferences maybe or think about like all the crypto people even though like the Ethereum people, Solana people, most of them started their journey with Bitcoin and almost all of them hold Bitcoin somewhere. This is either in cold storage like Ledger or it's an exchange like Binance. Almost everyone in crypto holds Bitcoin, but it's underutilized. So I think just mapping Bitcoiners to a single ideology or they don't touch their Bitcoin is incorrect. I think Bitcoin by vision created to become a money, right? And money needs to be used. That's the whole point of Bitcoin. If you don't use Bitcoin, the block rewards will go zero. and then the hash rate will go down and then the Bitcoin become vulnerable. So if you want actually Bitcoin to survive, Bitcoin needs to be used. That's the technical part. But Satoshi's vision was peer-to-peer electronic cash. It's not like a digital gold in the paper, they say. They say it's electronic cash. It needs to be used in financial activities such as DeFi. So I think assuming that no Bitcoin or Toshler Bitcoin is just not correct. Most people in crypto use crypto daily they have Bitcoin but Bitcoin is probably the only asset they cannot use at the moment and I'm I'm betting that if they have a will to to use their Bitcoin in DeFi just like they use on their Ethereum DeFi They have almost no reason to use Ethereum or Solana at all at this point Do you see Citrea as something the average Bitcoin holder will interact with directly? Orkun do you see it as more behind the scenes, powering Bitcoin apps? Hopefully, the second, hopefully we become so abstracted that people only know about applications built on top of Citrea and not the infrastructure itself. Last year we launched saying ourselves the first ZK Rollup up on Bitcoin. That was important to actually say that we are actually like a technical team. We know what we are building and this is something real. But right now we have our incubation program called Citrea Origins Incubating Applications. We call them Bapps. Bitcoin applications, it's a fine abbreviation. And yeah, the main thing is they are next generation of Bitcoin applications. They are not custodial. They are not, they don't have like a very bad UX on UI. They are very modern using latest technologies that's enabled by Citrea and they directly serve to the end users. So that hopefully end users will only know about the applications. They will use them without trusting anyone. and behind the scenes Citrea will be the engine that's powering all of those. That's why our marketing is specifically towards application developers. We work with them really close. I probably spend 80 % of my time working with founders in the ecosystem because we want to create the best user experience for Bitcoiners. And that should happen through applications using the chain just purely for send and receive something. But even some good wallets and fintech applications can abstract that. and provide much better experience than using MetaMask for example. Yeah, and I've always said that, you know, when I speak with founders and application developers, know, the value of the underlying chain, you know, whether it be a layer one or a roll up, is really the sum of all the applications on top of it. And, but a lot of people kind of forget that. I think for two reasons. One reason is a lot of these layer ones actually don't have very many projects on it. or applications and the ones that are in the layer ones with applications don't have a lot of users. And so people kind of default back to the underlying chain. What is really interesting about Citrea is a roll up on Bitcoin. It's the first of its kind. And so being the first in a brand new category of ZK roll ups on Bitcoin, pretty fascinating. And I've been studying a lot. I've known for a while, but have been reviewing new kind of, I've been studying categories, categories in marketing, categories just in business. And the first company in any new category tends to become the winner. And Citrea is the first in this brand new category of ZK rollups on Bitcoin. take carries you a long way there. And I think that's that's pretty awesome. Hopefully we win by providing the best experience and applications to users, not just because we are the first. But that's why we are not just like sitting back, getting relaxed and saying that all we are the first, just like, okay, people will use it. We spend a lot of time for the ecosystem developments and to provide best UX for users, create most useful applications, not the applications that will just farm and dump you. But the actual applications that people want to use and they need in their real life, most people in the world, they don't have access to USD, they don't have access to bank. I'm based in Turkey, the inflation here is crazy. People don't want to hold Turkish Riyal. If you hold USD, there is tax and a bunch of stuff. And Bitcoin is a way to exit from all the stuff. And in this current form, it's not enough. And Citrea is created to just like overcome those stuff that makes Bitcoin hard to use. so that it's easy, people can easily use it and then we reach to more users in the world that's not crypto native doesn't know anything about crypto but actually need Bitcoin to live their lives. You mentioned, you know, part of your go-to-market strategy for Citrea is focusing on developers and getting them on board first and then forming strategic partnerships. How do you balance your work between the two to drive adoption? I'm looking at the ecosystem page on the website and looks like there's about 22 to 25 projects right now. I guess what portion of these are established projects versus upstarts that that are developed small independent developers building on top of Citrea. So I think in the current ecosystem page, almost all you see is the infrastructure that is needed to create applications such as data indexes, RPC endpoints, or Echos, Vault providers. And that is like the first thing that we established since our DevNet launch last summer. And now I think compared to what we try to do, like try to onboard from other ecosystems versus have native applications is... almost fully open-ended towards native applications. We don't think multi-chain applications are capable of providing best experience for your user base because they actually are a separate user category that you cannot treat as same as like a Solana degen, right? You cannot have a UI where all the Solana degens and Bitcoiners who never touched crypto using the same interface. It's impossible to get them use that interface and understand that interface. And we realized most of the multichain teams is not putting enough efforts to fix that problem in this space. So we decided, okay, what we will just like have visionally aligned people that believes like the same vision as us, like the hyper bitcoinization, Bitcoin has money and then builds around that specifically for Bitcoiners and for Bitcoin. so I think we are fully open needed towards that. I don't think an ecosystem in our stage should be credible, natural, or chase for like third party to people to just like come and deploy, but it should be very open needed towards your user base, like the go-to-market user base, which is Bitcoiners. so we are very, very open-ended towards that today, actually, right? The moment we are now recording this, one of the applications we incubated is going public, publicly launched, it's called Tanari. It's like an account abstraction wallet that allows you to access Bitcoin finance without needing to know what's happening behind the scenes, what am I using, which chain I'm using. They are fully abstracted so that you actually sign transactions with face ID. There is no seed phrase, there is no private key. There's only biometrics that you use to sign transactions and it's sync across your device using pass keys. So this was something that you could never build on bitcoin before and now you are actually building this and this is probably the best bitcoin fintech app that cannot steal your money it's called Tanari yes it's T-A-N-A-R-I I will send the links yeah if you always go to Stray account you will see in our twitter that we are always highlighting the developers building on our ecosystem That was one of the most exciting ones that we have been working for quite some time and now they're opening their blog and like their webpage that people can read about it. And I just think that like this is the reason we are building Citrea and there are many more applications in the incubation program. This is also a reason for us to build Citrea that will provide better access to Bitcoin and build their own Bitcoin. Now attracting developers to your roll up is really hard work. How are you doing? How is Citrea attracting developers and yeah, I guess what's the developer acquisition there? Yeah, I think there are a couple of different strategies in the space overall. Obviously, like the most established chains with large treasuries, COVID grants, like very large grants that's maybe even sometimes bigger than our own funding. And that's probably not enough, creating not enough kind of skin in the game for builders. And also it requires a very large treasury, which we skipped that basically. And the second thing is just like what we are doing, go after developers on every platform that's building on Ethereum, building on Solana, building on other chains, and tell a bit about tooling and more division. Because most builders in the space, it's like you think about Ethereum OGs, they were all Bitcoiners in the past. Even Justin Drake, like he hates Bitcoin, but he was organizing Bitcoin meetups before Ethereum was created. So all of these people were actually Bitcoiners before they love Bitcoin. And once they realized that the things that they couldn't build on Bitcoin, so that they pivoted to build on Ethereum is now available to build on Bitcoin. So that's one thing that's just like lights to the developers. And so that they think, okay, this actually aligns with what I got into space for the first moment. And now I'm actually do that on Citrea and the tooling is easy enough for me to do this. So that's kind of like the overall strategy that we are following just like talking about the tooling available here, talking about how our vision is and how we are supporting developers, not for just like tech, but also the go-to markets, co-marketing, fundraising and everything. That's why I spent so much time. My background is in engineering, so I can do product quite easily. But I'm also running the BD growth marketing side of things at Citrea for almost two years. Mm-hmm. can provide some valuable feedback to those applications that can also play the same playbook as Citrea and then launch and then build their product and get their initial users. You know, every roll up, every chain needs at some point, you know, one huge winner that will then attract, becomes the magnet for other application developers to come to your chain. And Tanari looks to it. mean, I've never heard of it until now, but it looks very, very promising and really exciting. How is a... you know when I when I do a transaction in Tanari how are they using Citrea underneath. Yeah, it's actually the moment you create, let's say sign up, you click sign up in the app, it deploys a smart contract account on Citrea. Using EIP 7720, which is like a very new way of doing smart contract accounts on Citrea. And then at moment your account is actually a programmable account on Citrea. And then you pick a username and then anyone can simply send you Bitcoin and then you hold in your wallet. once you click send, it will ask for whom do I send. which amount I send and then it asks for your biometrics to actually sign the transactions because it uses a curve that's not the default curve of Ethereum, the signature curve that's actually used in, for example, Apple secure enclave to actually sign transactions inside the hardware so that it's fully biometric access. cannot get, even if your phone is stolen, you have advanced social recovery such as ZK email. family guardians that you can recover your account but otherwise there is no way that someone can steal your money by getting your secret key or getting your seed phrase because they don't exist. This is really cool. as far as, Citrea doesn't have a live token, correct? Right, okay. doesn't have a token. Citrea uses Bitcoin as the guest token. So it's also EVM compatible. Think about you open MetaMask and instead of eat you see Bitcoin there. The as a data availability layer for Bitcoin is first of all, is that is that a correct way to describe what's the trade? OK, how how is Citrea? I guess tell us about the fees and and how how Citrea is, I guess, accruing value. Yeah, so the Bitcoin DA is one of the most limited DAs in the space. think the most for sure probably. it's compared to... exactly. And that value brings security, right? Obviously, modern blockchains like Celestia has different ways to get security, such as data-valued sampling, light nodes, etc. But traditional blockchains like Bitcoin, the only way... for you to get security is use that block space and have a full node ready. And Bitcoin by far has the most number of full nodes around the world. It's very distributed, it's decentralized, it's proven, it's secure. So that that block space is valuable. You have to pay to get into the block space. And the logic behind Citrea is it's a roll up. It means it bundles transactions. And that bundling gets us some advantages such as compression. We use something called state diffs. which basically says that, for example, if you do a trade on Uniswap, let's say Bitcoin USDC pool, and if I also do another trade in that same pool, in the same proving interval, our transactions are overlapped so that they are not double counted, instead they are merged, and now they generate less data than an individual transaction, so that this compression brings us less fees. So if you try to, even though let's Bitcoin is EVM compatible, using Citrea will be much cheaper because we bundle transactions and then that fee is shared among thousands of people and transactions so it's much less. I don't think we will compete with Solana, Arbitrum or whatever in the level of fees but the security wise it will be definitely much more secure than those stuff because it's right on top of Bitcoin. It's almost as secure as Bitcoin so that security comes with a cost. That's why the main applications we think will be highly valuable applications. It won't be a meme coin launchpad. It will be probably a bitcoin backstable coin, bitcoin lending borrowing tool, like applications like Tanari, private payments, RWA. I think those kind of high value stuff needs to be on Citrea. But we have some other engineering efforts to make everything possible. The one was our partnership with Celestia, which enables people to deploy their app chains. that using Celestia DA so they are much more scalable and cheap. And in the longer term we have something called Volition model which is a very technical concept. I don't want to just deep dive there, but it basically allows us to have subsequent transactions still using Bitcoin as the native assets. That's fascinating. I didn't know about the partnership with Celestia. Yeah, it's something that we announced I think a month or two ago. It basically allows you to just spin off a layer tree on Citrea. You can think like an app chain that still uses Bitcoin through Citrea, but all the data goes to Celestia, so it's quite cheap and scalable. I think the modular approach gives developers more options. Exactly, if you want to deploy a Perptex, maybe deploying on Citrea is not the best thing that you can do, but you can easily deploy it on as an L3 on Citrea that uses Celestia DA, which gives you subsense fees, almost unlimited gas, as you still use Bitcoin as the main asset. Let's go back to developer marketing. I'm looking at the origins, origins.citrea.xyz. this is the, how would you describe the origins program? Is that the developer acquisition, developer grant program? Okay. not a grant program or I don't say it's an ecosystem program, it's an incubation program. Yes, incubation slash acceleration, I guess, because most of the founders that we work with is very, very early stage. Like the Taner team, once we start working together, they didn't even have, let's say the product wireframes or whatever. They just knew that they want to build something that will make Bitcoin finance easier. and then we start working together. So it's, will say, not based on projects, but based on people. Because like I said, vision is not something that projects can align, but people can actually align very easily. So all the founders who work, they start working with us in very early stage, pre, pre, pre-seed even, that kind of stage. They are just sharing the same vision of us. So it's more like an incubation, but obviously we are definitely open to accept more people who actually build something. and not happy about how they are doing with the other chain, for example, or they want to move that infrastructure to Bitcoin from Ethereum or other chains. We are definitely open to talk with those people as well. But generally so far it was very early stage. And on the Origin site, one of the questions I was going to ask you was, what types of applications does Citrea unlock? And you already answered that by explaining that probably not meme coins, but it's going to be really high value applications like Tanari, as well as other payment applications, maybe a stable coin based on Bitcoin, which would be really amazing. Yes. in really high value applications like that. And you explain that on the origins.sitrea.xyz website. This is really exciting, Orkun. Yeah, I'm excited as well. I'm still like it's been two years, but we don't have a main net at the moment. We are still working on test net for quite some time. But if you ask me, I'm still as excited as the night that we got the idea with my founders. Because it's something that I really think is valuable in this space. You interview a lot of founders who is doing very valuable stuff. But on the other side, crypto is just full of useless applications. So it's created for like just one week. hype cycle and building something that's more long-term and then actually useful is what makes me happy. That's why I'm also very excited about it. And I love that you're building on Bitcoin and you're using ZK, which is highly reliable, mathematically proven, you're building on Bitcoin and the types of applications that this could unlock will be very exciting. Yes, hopefully it will be. Tanari is just one of them, but there are a couple of them still getting like probably in couple of weeks getting out of stealth. It will be much more exciting. out of stealth. Tell us about the, so on the origin side, on the very bottom, there's two hacker house links. I just spoke with Naruto from Avale and we talked at length about hacker houses as a way to bring awareness, developer awareness, as well as to bring independent developers on to start building on your project. What was your experience with the hacker houses? So there are two links, we did one of them is Hapy Hour, but we did actually two real hacker houses. One was in Bangkok during DevCon. It was great. We actually, it was, we accepted hackers outside, basically based on applications. We invited a couple of people, but it was basically outside developers coming and hacking on Citrea and they built really cool stuff from privacy to NFTs to DeFi. That was... important for us because it was early days of testnet and it was a real moment in person that we got feedback on what we are building. Obviously like in podcasts we are talking and it's really exciting but hearing that from developers and also the bad side of thing like this RPC doesn't work like your indexer sucks whatever this is really helpful for that early stage project and so it was really exciting but we did another one two weeks ago in Istanbul We hosted teams that's actually building in Distro Origins at the moment. We rented a really cool penthouse in Istanbul that fits like full Boss Wars view. There were unlimited kebabs and baklava, so everyone was happy. So that was really interesting because both them and I realized like building together in person with the same vision just accelerates many things. Because those developers also interact with each other, learn what they're building. So they got maybe integrate their products or they become more open-ended towards what they actually want to do. And if what they do, they can compose with other products. So I think just like a building an ecosystem is not just about the technical stuff, but the across especially is important to align the vision for everyone become more composable, it creates maybe shared distribution channels. So it was really, really helpful and fun, of course. What was your experience like at DevCon with being a Bitcoin focused project? Yeah, it was interesting because I think last year there were a lot of scamming Bitcoin L2s around. Maybe you see, especially after we launched and like the Bitcoin paper came out, there are a lot of opportunities, projects come out and I say, we are a Bitcoin L2 by our token. And then that narrative was about the DAI back then in DEF CON. So most people were a bit skeptical if I need to be transparent, but... Once I talk about the technical stuff behind the project, like how much effort we do put in and how do we actually understand what we are building, we are not like bullshitting, right? So once they actually hear that, they become, then this is really interesting. I want to see the code base and it's fully open source so that they can go and read. So that was also important for us to acquire developer and like more broader kind of compose with the other people. Our background is in... Ethereum so we built privacy on Ethereum we know almost all the ZK developers on Ethereum So they are aware of what we are building but even for other people I think they become more close to that Bitcoin mindset because now they see that actually what they're doing on Ethereum is possible on Bitcoin So why not also use it or build on it? So we get a lot of positive feedback But beginning of my talks with like many people that never heard about Bitcoin authors were very very skeptical Yeah. Let's talk about the name Citrea. What's your approach to brand building? There seems to be kind of a citrus theme in Citrea with Citrea, Clementine, Kumquat. Yeah, so the Citrea name obviously comes from citrus. That's because Bitcoin always reminds orange because the logo color and like everything we call it orange chain sometime, right? So the citrus actually comes from that. And the one thing that we really cared during the initial marketing process is just something that we can create an ecosystem around. Because even that time we knew that we are not building a product, but we are building an ecosystem, which is a product of products like it. basically shell product over all of them, right? So the citrus was a good name because it's a family name. It's not like an individual element in some family. It's not like orange or it's not like Kumquat. It's the citrus family. And under it, we created obviously sub-brands like Clementine, which is our bridge name. There's Kumquat, our first bridge name. There's Tangerine, our second forks name. So it's like going like that. And one of our ecosystem projects called themselves Satsuma. which is a member of Citrus family again. So that was the reason. And for brand building, I think I learned a lot during the process because it was also my first time doing marketing, branding stuff. And I realized people has like some biases towards some things and then orange, Citrus, creating a family, creating sub products. It was just highlighting the brand itself. And I really liked it because it creates like a... something in people's heads that they always keep that in mind because they see a lot of stuff that just calls the Citrea as Citrus Narrative. I think it's really brilliant what you and the team have done. And you're exactly right. Like you're trying, there's so much noise out there and you want to penetrate through the noise, create something that people can recognize and remember. And also you want to add, not just recognize and remember, but can they have a feeling about the thing? And everyone has smelled an orange, everyone has tasted an orange. And in the number of sub-branch you can create from the citrus family is enormous. So there's a lot of potential extensions you can create from the citrean name. I think it's really smart what you guys have done. You've created a really good foundation. Thank you. Yeah, it's still in the early days of the brand. We are experimenting a lot of stuff, but it's really good to hear. Thank you. Yeah. What about as you think about skeptics that, maybe one criticism you might hear is, you know, Bitcoin is this really archaic architecture. You can't do anything on it. People that built ordinals, they got lucky. And, you know, it's still not very programmable or usable. And what's Trea is doing is really nice and really good. But, you know, it's probably not going to work. So I'm just going to stick with Solana or Ethereum or some other other layer one. Like what's the, what's your response to the skeptics? I think we are here for long term, right? I don't need to show them during the launch we have billion TVL, we have like billion active addresses. Those are not real metrics. Those are usually fake, fake people, people's attention. And we don't want to do that. We want to be as organic as possible. even during the hour launch, if we have less TVL than most projects claim to Bitcoin out to, that's fine. As long as it's utilized, actually in DeFi, people actually using that TVL, it's not like a TVL that's coming to the deck sitting there, but no one's actually trading on the decks. So it's just like LP's money. It doesn't mean anything to us. So what we try to do is just like create an organic ecosystem where people is actually using and then the liquidity will obviously need to be scaled. as the time goes. So, and once we reach to that point where the organic growth is in the stage that everyone can take it, like just look and see, and that's actually happening, I think that moment people will be less skeptical and maybe try to use the chain. Also, if there's good on-ramps and applications ready for them to be used. It was the same for Solana as well, right? In the early days, I think it was really pumped artificially before FTX crash. And I think after FTX it was, it's kind of like organic states, but the growth after that point was almost fully organic. I first kind of saw how they come to Istanbul to do their Solana headgrouse, they're engaged with developers, talk with them. Obviously they, at the time they have more limited treasury, they have huge treasury, but they still spend time on the developers and build that growth very, very organically, both for the liquidity and users and the developers. So I think that's really valuable. And we want to go through that same curve, basically, not the other way around, just like start with very high, then get lower, just like any other project in the space, but just grow organically. And then that creates more resonance with people that actually see your growth from day one to day hundreds. And there's enough applications they want to use. So they will come and use. You know, you bring up a really interesting point. I remember the early days of Solana. One of my friends actually was, he was the person that, he started as a community moderator and he became their main hackathon person and he actually arranged and organized, you know, the very first, I think two or three hackathons. They were virtual hackathons or they were all online. And I remember talking to him one day asking, hey, how are registrations going? And this was very early days, like, you know, very, very early days. And he told me the number of registrants. And I was shocked because at the time I was very involved with the ETH Global team and, you know, going to ETH Global hackathons. And he told me the number of registrations that they had. And I was just so surprised at how big it was. And that's the first time I started paying attention to the Solana ecosystems is when he told me how many developers were registered. And then I learned later that it wasn't just developers, but it was actually just lots of other people registering because they're hackathons. They made them into not just hackathons, but they also had speakers. They also had panel discussions. Like they created a very, almost like a media arm. that invited all types of participants. So it wasn't just developers, but there was also a lot of developers, a lot of normal people that just wanted to listen to content. And I think that was, at least for me, is when I started paying attention. It's like, okay, there's something going on over there that I didn't know about that feels really organic. I can't ignore these guys. And yeah. moment happened after the FTX crash, they happened, like Istanbul Hay Cross. I realized they actually spent a lot of money to the venue and everything, but they actually cared. They are not faking it to just like look good. They did it to access developers and stuff. So I was really admired about their approach back then. Let's talk about community building for Citrea. You know, as we just discussed, there's, you know, all types of community members. There's developers, there's non-developers. I guess how, what's your plan for involving non-developers to become part of the community? Yeah, hopefully like I said through applications. We have like a discord community, large I will say twitter account that people actually following us but like I said eventually they need to use the applications, they should use the applications. So that's like one part of things where we are aligned with the applications, we know what they're building and we can share with our community about what they're building. It's not like someone is doing something that I never heard of, everyone building on Citrea I personally So that I can talk with community about them and say that they're building this. It's really cool. So it's basically our way of building community. Just like doing marketing on Twitter and like other stuff, it onboards a lot of crypto native people. But at same time, we are going to a lot of Bitcoin conferences, which is much less crypto native people there. It's not like an DevConnect or like an Eat Global, right? It's just like a Bitcoiners coming there. And there, like I was in Bitcoin Nashville where Trump spoke. There were a lot of kind of like American citizens coming just to see Trump. They don't know anything about Bitcoin, but they were looking to the boots, trying to understand what's going on. And we talked one by one with all of them, described maybe Bitcoin to some. If they know about Bitcoin, we described how it actually works and how they can use it with Citrea more in the future. So it was a really good experience. I think. Community building in general is just like about posting memes on Twitter and like boosting your Discord count. It's not us. But what we try to do, I personally try to do is just like engage with users, developers, builders in person, one-to-one, get know them and then just apply their feedback based on how we are doing, is it good or bad and stuff. You know, community building is really, really hard to do. And I think where a lot of crypto projects miss the mark is they look at engagement and then they stop there. But what really needs to happen is that there needs to be organic, authentic engagement. And then the engagement needs to lead to community. so engagement becomes a stepping stone to community, not the other way around. Exactly. And I think a lot of projects kind of miss that part. They optimize, they really sub-optimize for engagement, but then engagement never leads to community. But it's also really, really hard to create community. And so it makes sense, but becomes a really, really important part of any crypto project, especially as the project gets closer to mainnet in a token generation event to have that community. and in that ecosystem. You know, as you've been building for the last two years, what are some lessons learned from your experience so far about building a project in crypto? Yeah, I think the one thing is about balancing the technical and non-technical stuff inside the company and to the public as well. Because even though what we are building is technically very valuable, if there is no apps, if there is no users that wants to use the network, it doesn't mean anything. We just spend millions of dollars to development which ends up having a ghost chain. That's not something that we definitely want to have. So starting... the brand recognition earlier, sending the marketing earlier, starting the BD growth side of things earlier for like a chain obviously is very, very helpful. And for applications, I think also seeing that like some random applications has claiming to have like millions of users who trade on their platform, but they're most likely bots or like silberge bots like MEB bots or whatever is just like, don't get upset or like don't get down. by just looking to the numbers and like, they're getting a lot of users. need to build something that will get same influential. I think most applications in like web two, they just target very specific user base and try to acquire that user base. And for both applications and chains, they need to be more focused rather than being generalists. They need to be opinionated towards one specific user base built for their needs, built the best tool for their needs so that they become the users. And then, maybe try to expand from there. But even from day one, if you try to target, I want to have all the crypto users in my application. It's not going to happen. Yeah, I think that's a really good lesson. And a lot of very technical, most technical founders don't, they don't pay attention to community business development or marketing or growth until later. But it's actually one of the first things, probably most, one of the most important things to focus on first. Yeah. I think my CTO will get angry to me, but I think it's harder than developing the roll up itself. It's like, because obviously the engineering is very, very heavy. But after one point, if you know what you are building, it's just like continuous building, right? You wake up and you know what to do. But branding, marketing community is not something like that. You wake up, everything changed. Now you need to just create something new. that will reach to more users that day because that day's topic is maybe different than what was yesterday's. So it's, I would say, more dynamic that needs more attention, which is personally, get, it was more hard for me in the beginning than doing engineering. Yeah, it's hard work. It really is. Well, Orkun, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I'm very excited about what you guys are doing at Citrea. And I'm really looking forward to this Bitcoin Renaissance. And I envision dozens, maybe even hundreds of projects building on Citrea as you guys launch Mainnet. And very excited for what's to come. Yes, hopefully. Thank you for having me, Peter. I really enjoyed the chat. It was also good to remind myself some of the points that I did in the past and I'm doing right now. So I'm really grateful for the chats. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.
