Citrea, a Bitcoin-focused application platform backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, has unveiled its mainnet, opening the door for bitcoin to be used more directly across lending, trading and U.S. dollar settlement, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
The debut also includes ctUSD, a native stablecoin fully backed by short-term U.S. Treasury bills and cash. The token is issued by MoonPay, with Citrea positioning it as compliant with the GENIUS Act framework.
The project built ctUSD as a settlement and liquidity layer that can support institutional-grade activity, natively anchored to Bitcoin rather than relying on intermediaries or wrapped BTC.
Citrea, which has raised $16.7 million across two funding rounds, is one of numerous Bitcoin-focused projects looking to enable functions on the world’s original blockchain. Rather than just holding bitcoin and letting it sit idle in the long term, these firms hope to enable further monetization of investors’ bitcoin, including lending and stablecoin issuance. Prominent examples of such competitors include layer-2s Botanix and Stacks.
Orkun Kilic, co-founder and CEO of Chainway Labs, which is building Citrea, said the mainnet is designed to bring Bitcoin-secured financial activity onchain, enabling BTC-backed lending and institutional credit with settlement through ctUSD.
Citrea said more than 30 Bitcoin-native applications are already prepared to serve users across additional financial use cases, as platforms increasingly look to expand Bitcoin’s role beyond passive holding.
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/01/28/peter-thiel-and-galaxy-backed-citrea-wants-to-turn-idle-bitcoin-into-a-high-speed-bank-account
