Paper 2025/776 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/776 ↗
Clementine: A Collateral-Efficient, Trust-Minimized, and Scalable Bitcoin Bridge
Abstract
This whitepaper introduces Clementine, a secure, collateral-efficient, trust-minimized, and scalable Bitcoin bridge based on BitVM2 that enables withdrawals from rollups or other side systems to Bitcoin. Clementine proposes a new Bitcoin light client that remains secure against adversaries controlling less than 50% of Bitcoin’s hash rate, assuming at least one honest Watchtower in a permissioned set. The protocol is collateral-efficient, reusing locked funds over time and reducing unnecessary dust outputs through the strategic use of 0-value outputs, and scalable, enabling a single challenge per Operator to slash multiple misbehaviors. This increases throughput and reduces on-chain load without compromising security. Clementine enables trust-minimized and efficient peg-outs from Citrea to Bitcoin, making zk-rollups on Bitcoin practical and unlocking new paths for native scalability and interoperability.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2025-05-02: last updated
- 2025-04-30: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2025/776
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/776,
author = {Ekrem Bal and Lukas Aumayr and Atacan İyidoğan and Giulia Scaffino and Hakan Karakuş and Cengiz Eray Aslan and Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos},
title = {Clementine: A Collateral-Efficient, Trust-Minimized, and Scalable Bitcoin Bridge},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/776},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/776}
}