Chainway

Chainway is a Bitcoin-based ZK sovereign rollup project, with its core product named Citrea. Its business involves processing transactions off-chain, batching them, and publishing state diffs and ZK validity proofs to Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol, using Bitcoin as the data availability layer. The core narrative is leveraging Bitcoin's security, liveness, censorship resistance, and reorg resistance to secure the rollup, while using recursive ZK proofs to allow new nodes to verify the entire chain history efficiently.

The market pain point it addresses is Bitcoin's limited scalability and the data availability problem in Layer 2 solutions. Chainway introduces a forced transaction mechanism: users can submit a specially formatted transaction directly on the Bitcoin chain, and the sequencer must include it in the next Layer 2 block, otherwise the block will be rejected by clients. This enhances censorship resistance. However, the cross-chain bridge trust model is not fully detailed, and the current implementation lacks consensus among off-chain clients, making it more of a client-verification type solution.

In the past six months (2026-03-12 to 2026-09-12), Citrea's token CTR went live on May 26, 2026, marking a milestone for its coordination asset model. The project also participated in Builders Week Istanbul in September 2025 (though slightly outside the window) and held its first Citrea Origins hacker house in April 2025. No major negative events were reported within the two-year window, though the bridge trust issue remains an open technical challenge.