Citrea, a Bitcoin application layer backed by Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, announced on September 24, 2026 that it has acquired Crest, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet. The acquisition is intended to make private Bitcoin transactions effortless, intuitive and practical for everyday users.
According to the announcement, Bitcoin’s market capitalization has surpassed $1.5 trillion, but its transparent public ledger has made user balances, counterparties and transaction histories into surveillance targets. The companies argue that as Bitcoin grows and surveillance technology improves, the consequences of that transparency will compound. Currently, users seeking privacy must either give up self-custody, use expert-only technical workflows, or swap into alternative privacy assets.
Citrea said networks like Zcash have already shown the demand for simple privacy, and with the acquisition it aims to bring that same standard to Bitcoin. Crest will be built on Citrea’s Bitcoin-secured execution environment and is positioned as a new benchmark for mobile, self-custodial Bitcoin privacy. As part of the deal, Crest founder Meliksah Gurtemel joins Citrea as Product Lead.
“Solving Bitcoin privacy is the single largest unlock for meeting real user demand on a Bitcoin layer,” said Orkun Mahir Kılıç, Co-founder and CEO of Chainway Labs, a core contributor to Citrea. “Crest is built to be the primary gateway for onboarding users and liquidity from the Bitcoin and privacy ecosystems into Citrea.”
In the coming weeks, Crest plans to launch its Bitcoin mobile wallet with automatic shielding, private BTC transfers, and cross-chain onboarding from Bitcoin and Ethereum. The wallet will also support private cross-chain swaps, allowing BTC to pay EVM addresses in USDC or ETH privately. Over time, Citrea aims to extend private BTC utility across its broader ecosystem.
Citrea is backed by investors including Founders Fund, Galaxy, Maven 11, Delphi Digital, Erik Voorhees and Balaji Srinivasan. Crest brings zero-knowledge privacy pools to Bitcoin via Citrea and aims to remove the technical frictions of legacy privacy tools.
