Citrea launches CTR governance token and dual treasury for Bitcoin scaling network

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Citrea launches CTR token

Highlights

Citrea launches the CTR governance token with a fixed 10 billion cap, allocating 60% to the community and 40% to investors and early contributors under a four-year lock-up.
xCTR holders receive voting power over both the Citrea Governance Treasury and network decisions, including directing emissions toward specific capital pools and ecosystem growth.
Citrea introduces a gauge-based, vote-escrow staking system where only voting xCTR earns emissions, with a 50% instant unstaking penalty, and supports EVM-compatible apps via Bitcoin settlement.

Token structure and treasury design

As reported by The Block, Citrea says CTR is designed as a coordination asset that lets users and applications influence how capital and incentives are allocated across the network. Users who stake CTR receive non-transferable xCTR, which carries voting power over the Citrea Governance Treasury and broader network decisions.

Citrea Foundation Director Orkun Kilic says the mechanism gives users and applications direct control over incentive distribution. He says xCTR voters can direct emissions toward specific pools, creating a cycle in which value generated in the Bitcoin economy flows back to participants whose activity and curation support the ecosystem.

CTR has a fixed supply cap of 10 billion tokens. Citrea says 60% is allocated to the community through direct transfers, incentive programs and the treasury system, including 12% for the Genesis Airdrop, 25.16% for an xCTR-governed treasury and 22.83% for ecosystem growth.

The remaining 40% is split between 19.35% for investors and 20.66% for early contributors, both under a four-year lock-up with a one-year cliff. Alongside the governance treasury controlled by xCTR holders, the separate Citrea Foundation Treasury is set to manage research and development, ecosystem grants, operations and strategic initiatives.

Incentive model and ecosystem implications

Citrea is also changing its vote-escrow staking framework through a gauge system that it describes as a self-optimizing mechanism allowing the market to determine emissions. Under that system, stakers can vote on capital pools intended to support application development, with structure, parameters and budget left to governance discussion and activation.

Citrea says governance may also establish a vetting committee to expand the set of eligible applications over time. The protocol adds that the gauge system can be used not only to reward specific applications but also to encourage different user behaviors, including activity tied to neobanks built on Citrea.

Only xCTR used in voting earns liquidity emissions on the pools selected by holders, while staked CTR that remains inactive earns only unstaking penalty fees. Unstaking takes place over a 90-day window, with instant exits facing a 50% flat penalty and other exits subject to a penalty that decays from 50% to 0%, fees that Citrea says are distributed pro rata to remaining stakers.

Citrea uses zero-knowledge proofs to support smart contracts and EVM-compatible applications while settling back to Bitcoin for security. Its core developer, Chainway Labs, has also released the BitVM-based Clementine BTC bridge and the GENIUS Act-compliant ctUSD stablecoin issued by MoonPay; Chainway raised a $14 million Series A round in 2024 led by Founders Fund.

In our earlier coverage of BlackRock’s GENIUS Act comment letter to the OCC, we outlined how the firm urged regulators to drop a proposed cap on tokenized reserve assets and broaden what qualifies as eligible stablecoin reserves. The piece explained that these reserve-design rules could materially affect tokenized Treasury products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and, by extension, stablecoin issuers that rely on them ahead of the January 2027 compliance timeline.

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