Citrea: "Aiming to scale Bitcoin DeFi… stepping up push into the Korean market"

Citrea, a Bitcoin (BTC) scaling protocol, said it plans to expand into the Korean market to scale Bitcoin-based decentralized finance (DeFi).

Esad Yusuf Atik, co-founder of Citrea, attended a meetup held on the 5th at Dreamplus Gangnam in Seoul and said, "There are many investors in Korea who are passionate about virtual assets (crypto)," adding, "We will step up efforts to engage the Korean community through various events and AMAs (Ask Me Anything)."

Citrea is a project developing financial protocols using the Bitcoin network. While Bitcoin offers advantages such as high liquidity and security, its limited programmability has made it difficult to build DeFi applications. Atik explained, "Bitcoin Script only allows basic operations such as addition and subtraction, and it is difficult to store state or perform complex computations," adding, "That is why typical DeFi services such as decentralized exchanges (DEXs) or lending protocols could not emerge."

To address this, Citrea introduced an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible rollup architecture. Through the rollup structure, developers can deploy existing Ethereum (ETH)-based applications as-is, while data availability and settlement are handled on the Bitcoin network.

Atik said, "Our goal is to enable developers to build a wide range of DeFi services on the Bitcoin network, where liquidity and security are in place."

Citrea launched its mainnet in January after more than two years of development. To date, it has raised a total of $16.7 million in funding from Founders Fund, Galaxy, Delphi Digital and others.

Atik added, "As Bitcoin-based applications increase, it will have a positive impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem over the long term," and said, "We will work to launch a variety of DeFi services leveraging Bitcoin."