Citrea, a Bitcoin utility platform backed by Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, introduced as we speak the launch of its mainnet, in hopes to unlock lending, buying and selling, and different capital market exercise instantly on the Bitcoin community.
Alongside the mainnet debut, Citrea launched ctUSD, a U.S. greenback–denominated stablecoin issued by MoonPay and powered by M0.
The stablecoin is absolutely backed by short-term U.S. Treasury payments and money and is designed to align with the forthcoming GENIUS Act, positioning it as a compliant settlement layer for Bitcoin-based monetary exercise.
Regardless of Bitcoin’s roughly $1.3 trillion market capitalization, on-chain knowledge suggests a good portion of BTC stays economically idle. Greater than 61% of bitcoin — price an estimated $1.2 trillion — has not moved in over a yr, underscoring the restricted availability of native monetary infrastructure on the community.
“Bitcoin is the world’s largest digital asset, but its function in monetary markets has been largely constrained,” mentioned Orkun Kilic, co-founder and CEO of Chainway Labs, the corporate behind Citrea. “By bringing Bitcoin-secured monetary purposes on-chain, the Citrea mainnet permits capital to be deployed, managed, and settled instantly inside Bitcoin-native markets.”
Citrea’s bitcoin lending and merchandise
At launch, the platform is specializing in two core product classes: BTC-backed lending and BTC structured merchandise. The platform’s lending infrastructure was developed in collaboration with decentralized finance companies Morpho and UltraYield by Edge Capital.
For structured merchandise, Citrea is working with digital asset market makers reminiscent of Keyrock to supply BTC-denominated yield methods that mix on-chain and off-chain elements.
The corporate says greater than 30 Bitcoin-native purposes are already ready to launch on the platform, spanning a spread of institutional and retail monetary use circumstances.
“Citrea is addressing an enormous market alternative in serving to to make Bitcoin actually programmable,” mentioned Bridget Harris, an affiliate at Founders Fund. “By leveraging Bitcoin’s safety whereas enabling utility growth, Citrea scales the Bitcoin financial system as an entire.”
Galaxy Ventures basic companion Will Nuelle added that bringing capital markets and stablecoin liquidity instantly onto Bitcoin might deepen institutional engagement with the community.
Past increasing Bitcoin’s utility, this strategy might additionally affect miner economics.
As block subsidies decline over time, elevated transaction-driven exercise could assist maintain miner incentives by anchoring actual financial utilization on to the bottom layer.
The mainnet and ctUSD at the moment are dwell.