Citrea, the Bitcoin application layer backed by Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, announced on 24 September that it has acquired Crest, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet, in a move designed to bring Zcash-style privacy to the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin’s transparent public ledger exposes user balances, counterparties, and transaction histories to anyone, a problem the company argues will only compound as the asset’s more than $1.5 trillion market capitalization grows and surveillance tools improve. Users who want privacy today must forfeit self-custody, navigate expert-only workflows, or swap into alternative privacy assets. Citrea’s answer is to fold zero-knowledge privacy pools into a mobile wallet it now owns.
The acquisition
Built on Citrea’s Bitcoin-secured execution environment, Crest will become the gateway for onboarding users and liquidity from the Bitcoin and privacy ecosystems. 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.”
What the wallet promises
In the coming weeks, Citrea says Crest will launch a mobile wallet with automatic shielding, private BTC transfers, and cross-chain onboarding from Bitcoin and Ethereum. The wallet is expected to enable private cross-chain swaps where BTC pays Ethereum-compatible addresses in USDC or ETH. Over time, the company plans to extend private BTC utility across its broader ecosystem, which first went live with its mainnet as an early Bitcoin application layer.
A privacy push on Bitcoin
The deal follows a broader effort to bring confidential transfers to Bitcoin. Zcash, the network Citrea cites as evidence that demand for effortless privacy exists, recently set a timeline for its NU7 upgrade, which will shorten block times and retire older transaction types. Citrea’s approach is different: rather than pushing users toward a separate privacy chain, it embeds privacy inside a Bitcoin wallet. The wallet’s features remain upcoming rather than live, and whether adoption follows at scale is still an open question. For now, the acquisition is a bet that everyday users will value private transactions enough to try a new wallet without abandoning Bitcoin’s security model.
Privacy has long been a draw for crypto users well beyond payments, online casinos included, where added transactional discretion carries real practical value for players. BlockchainReporter’s crypto casino index covers more than 20 of these platforms, rated on licensing, bonuses, and payout speed.
