Citrea, the Bitcoin application layer backed by Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, has acquired Crest, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet, to bring zero-knowledge privacy pools to Bitcoin. Crest is built on Citrea’s Bitcoin-secured execution environment and will serve as a gateway for users and liquidity from the Bitcoin and privacy ecosystems. Its planned mobile wallet will offer automatic shielding, private BTC transfers and cross-chain onboarding from Bitcoin and Ethereum, including private swaps in which BTC can pay Ethereum-compatible addresses in USDC or ETH. Crest founder Meliksah Gurtemel will join Citrea as Product Lead. The initiative responds to the exposure created by Bitcoin’s transparent ledger as its market capitalization exceeds $1.5 trillion. Citrea’s approach differs from Zcash’s separate privacy network by embedding privacy within a Bitcoin wallet. The wallet’s features are due in the coming weeks and are not yet live, leaving adoption at scale untested.