Citrea: Bitcoin’s Newest Disappointing L2

Citrea, Bitcoin’s newest L2, launched. And, although it does have some interesting new wrinkles the result is more of the same:

Centralized sequencer, federated bridge 💀

In other words, you’re basically trusting one company, or a cartel of companies, to let you do DeFi stuff and pretend you’re using Bitcoin.

The good:

✅Transactions get batched and written to Bitcoin in a way that they could be completely reconstructed (on another L2 for example)

✅You can make transactions on Bitcoin itself in case the sequencer is down/censors, so when/if that gets resolved the L2 can “catch up”

✅Bitcoin miners get fees, so the chain’s security budget stops going to zero

The bad:

❌ One hardcoded company-run sequencer can decide to censor your transactions

❌ A federation of a few pre-selected companies run a bridge which could censor or potentially steal your Bitcoin

❌ In most aspects this works just like wrapped Bitcoin on a shitty centralized Ethereum L2

The main benefit, other than virtue signalling and giving users explicit to “shitcoin” without being labeled as shitcoiners, is that the Bitcoin network gets money from off-chain usage.

However, even this is fragile: Citrea could decide that it costs too much to write to the Bitcoin chain, and modify what they write (or choose to stop writing entirely).

If they have enough users, and these users don’t care much about the change (they are using a centralized company-run network after all), there’s really no recourse. They have to stick to the chain or fork to a new (but still centralized) one.

Bitcoin L2s have gone backwards in trust assumptions!

Admittedly, as much as I’ve been a critic of Lightning, you can theoretically use it in a fully trust-minimized and decentralized environment (even though friction and economic incentives have largely centralized it).

17 years in and Bitcoin is a dead end of innovation. A little sad to see.

Posted Using INLEO