Citrea launches 'Citrea Foundation,' a dedicated organization for expanding Bitcoin infrastructure

Citrea, a Bitcoin scaling protocol, has launched an independent organization—the 'Citrea Foundation'—aimed at accelerating Bitcoin’s programmable future.

On the 2nd (local time), the Citrea team announced the establishment of the foundation via its official channels, saying it will support the open-source community and developers to promote decentralization of Bitcoin’s application layer.

The Citrea Foundation set out its core mission as lowering barriers to Bitcoin adoption and ensuring the protocol’s evolution is driven by the community rather than any single entity. To that end, it identified key priorities including funding research into trustless infrastructure, accelerating ecosystem growth, running developer grant programs, and safeguarding decentralized governance.

In particular, the foundation plans to fund cryptography-focused foundational research with the goal of building a Bitcoin bridge that operates without collateral or liquidity constraints. The move is intended to reduce the trust dependence and security risks that have arisen in existing bridge structures.

It also plans to back early-stage growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem through strategic resource support and to operate grant programs so developers can interact with Bitcoin in a capital-efficient way. The foundation said these efforts are meant to guide the application layer’s evolution in a decentralized direction.

The Citrea Foundation will operate as an independent organization based in the Cayman Islands. The foundation’s activities will be overseen by a board comprising Orkun Kilic, Murat Karademir, and one independent non-executive director based in the Cayman Islands.

Orkun Kilic is a co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Chainway Labs and is one of the early architects of the Citrea protocol. Murat Karademir is a co-founder and chief operating officer (COO) of Chainway Labs; he previously founded the nonprofit Inzva and has worked with engineer and developer communities.

Citrea said the foundation will serve as a key support organization that accelerates Bitcoin’s global adoption over the long term, adding that it will focus on building an application ecosystem that supports self-custody-based accessibility, enhanced privacy, and the expansion of Bitcoin capital markets.