Citrea RPC for Bitcoin Apps

Citrea is a ZK rollup that publishes its batch proofs and compressed state diffs directly to Bitcoin, so its state can be rebuilt from Bitcoin alone. Other Bitcoin scaling designs often rely on sidechain validators, federated multisigs, or external data availability layers. BTC moves in and out through Clementine, a BitVM-based bridge whose safety requires one honest signer, watchtower, and challenger rather than an honest majority. On the execution side, Citrea runs a Type 2 zkEVM, so existing Solidity contracts deploy without changes.

GetBlock provides managed access to Citrea over HTTPS JSON-RPC and WebSocket endpoints. The service covers the standard eth_, net_, and web3_ methods, plus eth_subscribe and debug_trace* methods for transaction tracing. Running a Citrea full node yourself also requires a synced Bitcoin node. GetBlock operates both, with 99.99% uptime.

Any EVM-compatible wallet can connect to Citrea by adding chain ID 4114 and a GetBlock endpoint as a custom network. Citrea's Schnorr and secp256r1 precompiles also make it practical for smart-account wallets to verify passkey and Bitcoin-style signatures on-chain. Standard Ethereum SDKs for JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, and Rust work unchanged, as do common contract development frameworks.

Citrea RPC nodes return cBTC balances, transactions, receipts, blocks, event logs, contract storage, and ERC-20 token data via contract calls. Debug trace methods expose call-level execution for indexing and auditing. Because each block starts with system transactions that record Bitcoin headers and bridge events, applications can also read Bitcoin block data from the BitcoinLightClient contract with a standard eth_call.

Create a Citrea mainnet endpoint in the GetBlock dashboard to get HTTPS and WSS URLs that include your access token. Point any EVM library or wallet at that URL and set chain ID 4114, with cBTC (18 decimals) as the native currency. A first call to eth_chainId or eth_blockNumber confirms the connection.

Most applications rely on eth_getBalance, eth_call, eth_sendRawTransaction, eth_getTransactionReceipt, eth_getLogs, and eth_feeHistory, plus debug_traceTransaction for execution traces. Some Citrea blockchain nodes expose citrea_ and ledger_ namespaces, such as citrea_getLastProvenL2Height for checking how far the chain has been proven on Bitcoin.

Yes. GetBlock's Citrea endpoints support WebSocket connections with eth_subscribe for newHeads, logs, and newPendingTransactions. With 2-second blocks, newHeads delivers a steady feed of soft-confirmed blocks. Citrea's mempool is not public, so pending-transaction subscriptions may carry less signal than on chains with an open mempool.

Citrea mainnet uses chain ID 4114 (0x1012), and Citrea Testnet uses chain ID 5115 (0x13fb). Both networks use cBTC as the native currency with 18 decimals. Calling eth_chainId returns the hex value, which wallets and libraries use to confirm they are on the right network.