Galaxy Ventures-backed Citrea’s marketing is ‘misleading’

Robin Linus, author of the BitVM whitepaper, criticized Citrea, stating that the project’s marketing was “full of outrageous claims and misleading statements.”

Bitcoin zero-knowledge collection Citrea, which recently raised $2.7 million in a seed funding round led by Galaxy Ventures, has come under fire for allegedly misleading the public with its marketing campaign.

Robin Linus, creator of the BitVM whitepaper, describes the process of enabling Ethereum-like smart contract functionality for Bitcoin and expressed concerns in an X post on May 30, saying Citrea’s promotional materials are “full of outrageous claims and misleading statements.”

Although details remain slim, Linus said Citrea’s marketing efforts falsely implied a closer relationship with the BitVM project to attract investors and attention.

Ha? We have multiple open channels you can reach out to and we always try to communicate nicely with your team. I would wait for you to come to me and ask first. I should have seen that this was due to your public attitude over the last few months. This too was left in the shadows…

— orkun 🍊🍋 (@0x_orkun) May 30, 2024

Orkun Kılıç, co-founder of Chainway Labs, the team behind Citrea, responded to the allegations and said that Linus’ statements “overshadowed” his work. Kılıç emphasized that Citrea’s marketing accurately reflects its developments and features, drawing attention to his team’s expertise in zero-knowledge technology and previous innovations.

“We have a history in ZK and have invented different products such as PoI and PP. “We don’t need any connections and never have.”

Orkun Kilic

Citrea wants to create an execution layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, leveraging zero-knowledge proofs to scale the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic methods by which one party can prove to another that they know a value or have certain information without revealing the information itself. They have been deployed in cryptocurrency to increase privacy and scalability, with notable applications including zk-SNARKs in Zcash for private transactions and zk-rollups in Ethereum for efficient and scalable transaction processing.

According to the project’s technical documentation, Citrea proofs are “written in Bitcoin and optimistically verified via BitVM.”

In February, Citrea raised nearly $3 million in funding from multiple investors, including Galaxy Digital’s Galaxy Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Eric Wall and Anurag Arjun.

At the time of the funding announcement, crypto venture capital firm Pantera Capital predicted a significant opportunity in decentralized finance (defi) for the Bitcoin network. Pantera suggested that Bitcoin could potentially attract up to half a trillion dollars in value by enabling decentralized applications (dApps), making Bitcoin-based defi a major competitor in the crypto market.

Currently, Ethereum dominates the definition landscape, hosting most of the related activities. According to Pantera Capital, decentralized applications on Ethereum have historically accounted for 8% to 50% of Ethereum’s market cap; The current figure is approximately 25%. By applying these rates to Bitcoin, analysts at Pantera predict that the network could capture approximately $225 billion in value through Bitcoin-based dApps.