Citrea Acquires Crest to Bring Zcash-Style Privacy to Bitcoin
Zcash (ZEC)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
Citrea, the Bitcoin application layer backed by Founders Fund and Galaxy Ventures, has acquired Crest, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet, according to a report published by prnewswire.co.uk on 24 September 2026. The acquisition aims to make private Bitcoin effortless, intuitive, and practical for everyone by combining Citrea's execution environment with Crest's technology. Bitcoin's transparent public ledger has turned user balances and transaction histories into surveillance targets as the asset class grows.
Crest founder Meliksah Gurtemel joins Citrea as Product Lead to drive this vision forward. Citrea Co-founder and CEO Orkun Mahir Kılıç stated that solving Bitcoin privacy is the single largest unlock for meeting real user demand on a Bitcoin layer. The new wallet will feature auto-shielding, private BTC transfers, and seamless cross-chain onboarding from Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It will also enable private cross-chain swaps where BTC can pay EVM addresses in USDC or ETH privately. Citrea enables institutions and users to access Bitcoin capital markets while remaining anchored to the network's security model. The platform is backed by investors including Founders Fund, Galaxy, Maven 11, Delphi Digital, Erik Voorhees, and Balaji Srinivasan. Crest establishes a new benchmark for mobile, self-custodial Bitcoin privacy by eliminating the technical frictions of legacy tools.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for ZEC, measured when this story was written up on 24 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
Zcash (ZEC) is trading at $1,498.26 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 58.4% and a 4-hour buy ratio of 57.0%, indicating strong short-term buying pressure. This contrasts with the 24-hour buy ratio of 48.6%, suggesting that recent buying intensity is higher than the daily average. The 1-hour volume delta is positive at +$1,798,588, while the 4-hour delta is +$6,915,805, showing immediate accumulation. However, the 24-hour volume delta is negative at -$18,790,868, indicating that net selling has outweighed buying over the full day. The Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) for the 24-hour close is +$16,970,687, and there were 18 hours of net buying out of 24. Spot volume for the period was $652,883,436 across 2,821,823 trades.
The latest daily buy ratio of 52.9% sits at the 82nd percentile of the last 322 days, against a median of 50.2% - stronger buying than most days.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for ZEC, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the average buy ratio was 51.1%, making the current 24-hour ratio of 48.6% slightly lower by 2.5 points. Volume over the last day was 1.46 times the weekly average, indicating significantly higher activity than usual. The coin saw net buying on 5 of the 7 days in the preceding week. Price increased by 12.0% over the 8-day period, with a total volume delta of +$82,319,097. This represents an unusual day characterized by elevated volume and a dip in the buy ratio relative to the weekly norm.