BITCOIN RAILS EPISODE #27: Building Rollups on Bitcoin + the Battle for ‘OP_Return’ | with @citrea_xyz founders @0x_orkun and @ekrembal_

The founders of Citrea were unlikely superstars in the Bitcoin ecosystem—a team of 24-year-olds, barely out of school, with most of their prior experience in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Yet they have rapidly emerged as one of the leading teams at the forefront of BitVM research, design, and implementation—and are the crowned BitVM play for Founders Fund (@peterthiel + @joeykrug ) amongst others noteworthy investors in the space.

Their work was more recently noticed by Bitcoin Core developer @darosior who cites Citrea’s use of nonstandard transactions to support its bridge architecture as inspiration for Core’s recent shift in relay policy—and the infamous “Op-ReTuRn DrAmA” that followed suit.

In this episode, we cover Citrea's development of what will likely be the first “proper rollup” on Bitcoin mainnet, as well as their account of "what happened” with Bitcoin Core, the OP_RETURN drama, and their take on @LukeDashjr's vendetta against Bitcoin for data availability.

Other show notes include:

- Why no one took them seriously in the early days of “BitVM” and how they gained respect from the industry

- The practical challenges of building BitVM bridges and the creative attitude that gets them through blocks

- Citrea’s wild fundraising success with Galaxy and Founders Fund

- Why bridge modularity is *not* the approach for Citrea despite peers moving in that direction

- The OP_Return debate and FUD about Bitcoin for DA

As always, you can view this episode on YouTube or Spotify via the linktree in my bio.

This episode is powered by Best In Slot (@bestinslotxyz), the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing—as well as Citrea (@citrea_xyz ), a leading 'Bitcoin Rollup' technology and core contributor to the BitVM alliance.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:25 Intro to the Citrea team: Orkun and Ekrem

5:40 Proof of Innocence: privacy product on Ethereum

7:30 Why privacy is critical for crypto

9:15 Discovering Ordinals inscriptions on Bitcoin

12:30 Ordinals safe - an OG Ordinals wallet

14:30 Thinking about ZK and rollups on Bitcoin

18:00 The massive discovery of BitVM

21:10 Implementing BitVM and creating a Bitcoin bridge

24:40 Dealing with doubters and “scamming” accusations

26:25 How did Citrea fundraise so well?

29:12 Galaxy’s special understanding of Citrea

31:00 Involvement of Founders Fund

33:37 What exactly is a “real” rollup?

36:55 Citrea and the BitVM Alliance

38:55 Biggest challenges building a BitVM bridge

41:15 Citrea vs Clementine

43:39 Why focus on a single Citrea ecosystem vs modularity?

46:39 Will the Ethereans defect to Bitcoin L2s?

50:40 Troubles with bridging: Dust adds up!

53:10 Time sensitivity and zero sat outputs

56:00 The case for expanding the OP_Return limit

01:01:40 Why we don’t *need* larger OP_Returns

01:03:00 The drama around OP_Return

01:06:21 Takeaways about Citrea and OP_Return Drama

01:09:42 Propaganda against Bitcoin metadata

01:12:55 Being Bearish is Easy

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