Orkun Mahir Kılıç - The Platform for Bitcoin Capital Markets - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hey everyone and welcome. I hope you are enjoying the day and thank you for being here. Today I want to describe how does the platform for Bitcoin capital markets would look like at least to me. And my name is Orun Khalich. I am founder of Citria which you will soon learn about.

So to start with obviously the bitcoin right it's 16 years old and by definition in the white paper it's a electronic cash that would allow online payments to go through without any financial institution. So there are two main value proposition here obviously one is the payments it is very focused on single topic right it's just the payments and the second is the main important thing maybe is here is there is no middleman or is there is no institutions it is fully trustless so these two are the basically the main properties of bitcoin but it's not the only properties of bitcoin so it's the oldest crypto assets right it's the largest crypto assets it's the most well-known And the payment basically means that it was actually created as a medium of exchange rather than a store of value. Uh but today it's actually more like a store of value where people store their wealth in instead of using it for the payments and they use other assets for the payments. um outside of Bitcoin it's grew a lot right obviously in this conference probably the 90% of talks are actually about other stuff not Bitcoin maybe even 95 and what are those things right it's the altcoins there are a bunch of them the stable coins obviously they've been around for some time but they are taking off more aggressively rwas and all of them actually creates broader use cases than just payments which is defy structured products prediction markets, options on chain and basically bunch of other different use cases. But Bitcoin is still the king, right?

Even though the crypto ecosystem has very tremendous and big growth, uh Bitcoin still remains the most dominant asset in crypto even though the others also grow. So, it has all the trillions dollars of market cap to support a potential growth and it's just going steadily up independent from what's happening outside of Bitcoin. And it's not it. Bitcoin still has trillions worth of growth in front of it because right now it is just 2% of total global wealth. This is a report from river which you should probably check out.

And if you estimate that bitcoin will take actually 50% of the store of value market then bitcoin still has more than $200 trillion worth of growth in front of it. And this is basically 100 times more than what it is today. Um and in crypto generally if you look to the other talks or if you talk with any VCs or the liquid funds everything else in crypto actually exists to accumulate more Bitcoin or more wealth right and all the speculative assets that you are hearing about all the venture funds liquid funds now digital asset treasury companies they all benchmark against Bitcoin but most of the time they fall short because Bitcoin is the king. So is it bearish for everything else outside of Bitcoin? I don't think so because it's similar to the real world, right?

People try to accumulate more gold or more wealth, but it's not the only asset in real world. There all the securities, all the commodities, they generally exist to accumulate more wealth, but they have a different use case, different specialty and different goal coming to that path. If Bitcoin is the king, then you may ask why it is not the most active asset in DeFi or why it doesn't have a D5 ecosystem because there's a very big problem associated with Bitcoin. It is very very isolated from all the other markets even internally. H this is not just a technical problem but it's also a culture problem.

If you see all this Bitcoin rappers on different chains like Ethereum and Solana which are actually competing with Bitcoin for almost the same goal and because of its connection to also the energy markets through mining, it has a very significant thread and energy uh exposure and they all live offchain in stock markets such as minor stocks or different kind of hash rate derivatives, private credit to the miners. These are not onchain at all and they are usually not seen relevant to Bitcoin in the crypto ecosystem. But I I disagree. The the problem comes with this is actually the problem maybe creates this set of problems is there is no all-in-one platform that will satisfy all the needs and provide all the features for the Bitcoin ecosystem to be more maybe composible or altogether. And one of the biggest problems in here is the counterparty risk while deploying liquidity is very high in crypto ecosystem.

Imagine you are using rep BTC or Coinbase BTC. There's a counterparty there like Bitcoin or Coinbase who actually takes custody of your funds unlike Bitcoin is primary purpose and gives you a receipt token that you can use in DeFi. But it's not actually a DeFi, right? Because you have a very strong counterparty risk. Maybe if you're an institution that's fine because you usually have a commercial agreements and everything else in place with these companies but if you are retail you will probably be the first one that's get rugged in whenever something happens to these receipt tokens.

And the second problem is there is no platform that serves beyond payments in bitcoin but focus on more composibility across bitcoin ecosystem including this tokenized hash rate the stable coins and ras that's also a big problem. The only layer right now we can think is lightning which is very very focused on the payments. And the third is if you assume this $200 trillion dollar growth in the maybe next 10 years, there is no simple non-custodial onboarding flow for Bitcoin. You always go through centralized exchanges or similar products to actually buy your first Bitcoin. And that's a big barrier to uh maybe adopt the standards of Bitcoin.

So we fix it with Citra and Citra is the first platform that enables Bitcoin to function as a programmable money rather than just a passive assets. So so far all the things that you've seen is actually coming from a single problem. There's no platform to use Bitcoin like other crypto assets or in tand them with other crypto assets. Instead of you have to go to the thread, you have to go to Bitcoin L1, you have to go to maybe lightning or other layers to do the things that you need to do with your Bitcoin targets to fix this. You may ask how right there is this three points that I talked about.

One is liquidity, the other is composibility and the third is simple on boarding for newcomers. And the first point we solve this with Clementine which is our bridge that's based on a technology called BitVM. Uh a lot of terminology here but to put it simply BitVM is a way to verify the ZK proofs on Bitcoin L1. And that's a val valuable proposition because now instead of having a counterparty like a custodian, you have Matt as your counterparty and you can always trust Matt but not just random institutions and the Clementine is basically a bridge built on top of this technology and I put it real there because it's very hot term to use bitm nowadays but uh we have this white paper written by researchers from common prefix that also has an informal security proof that you can review And it's actually probably the will be the only one that's working in production in a secure way. And what it enables is maybe more important question.

But you can actually use this bridge to move your Bitcoin to a platform that doesn't require trust. And compared to the other alternatives you may heard today, they all have some sort of counterparties coming from either a multisig or a custodian. And the other thing is how to have a composible Bitcoin ecosystem. Right? Our strategy here is to incubate and on board Bitcoin native financial primitives and assets such as Bitcoin back loans, Bitcoin backstable coins, other stable coins, structured products, hash rate futures, and everything else you actually have outside of Bitcoin today.

And how to have a simple onboarding flow for newcomers coming to the Bitcoin. Thanks to Citrius technology, we have account abstraction. That's actually a very strong primitive that allows developers to build more expressive accounts such as pesky base, such as sponsored transactions, such as social login flows. And we have much faster transactions. It's just two seconds essentially and much lower fees than Bitcoin L1.

And these two are the applications that we are actually incubating right now. Tunner is simply put a Bitcoin fintech application that doesn't have a complex onboarding flow because you actually use your Face ID to sign transactions and log into your wallet. It doesn't require trust. It doesn't have the seed phrase complexity. So, it's much better than the existing alternatives you have today.

And Crest is also similar that allows you to login socially and buy and sell Bitcoin without any slippage or usually get abstracted as well. So we are building for Bitcoin capital markets. Bitcoin is huge and will grow even more. Right now there is $1.3 trillion held by individuals.

This is an estimation from tracking Bitcoin addresses. But we plan to grow this adoption even more by this Bitcoin applications we are incubating and building. And there is actively $150 billion in institutional capital excluding ETFs held by private and public companies that actually seeks yield on top of their Bitcoin just like other assets they have in their portfolio. And with this total addressable market of $225 trillion, we have to have these people coming to Bitcoin first time through a simple and non-custodial flow unlike going through centralized exchanges. So the market is actually quite big, right?

And YC3 is positioned to build Bitcoin capital markets because it's Bitcoin native unlike others such as side chains or the competing chains like you are hearing here all day. They're actually competing with Bitcoin. But essentially, Citria is an extension to Bitcoin that would allow all of these to happen. And it is a very strong ecosystem that you can check out from the web page or the applications I even told you that we are helping to build. And it has a very strong institutional backing as well from our investors such as Galaxy, such as founders funds.

And we are working with bunch of bit private and public bitcoin companies to bring more capital into bitcoin defy markets to allow people to trade better, borrow better, and do everything they need to do with their bitcoin. So let the era of bitcoin capital markets begin. Uh thank you for listening me today. Our test net is live. You can check it out and our mainet is coming quite soon.

So these are the links that you probably need to follow especially our X which we provide more frequent updates but I will be right outside of this room to have your questions if you have any and hope you have a nice second day as well. Thank you all.