Last week, Starknet communities around the world gathered to watch strkBTC go live. Drinks, food, good vibes, and a lot of excited people who get why strkBTC marks the next step for Bitcoin on Starknet: private, productive, and built for DeFi. Private Bitcoin is now live. And it is only getting started.

H1 2026 marked a major shift for @Starknet. From scaling Ethereum to becoming a privacy-preserving execution layer for onchain finance. With STRK20, strkBTC, private USDC, and new developer tooling, Starknet is building composable privacy across transfers, swaps, lending, and BTCFi. Read the full report:

“Today, if you want a shielded version of Bitcoin, it’s very hard to find one.” - @EliBenSasson On Starknet, that Bitcoin already exists. strkBTC can be shielded for private transfers, private swaps and now private liquid staking. Bitcoin that is private and productive.

Join us for Bitcoin Finance space this Wednesday (5/20) at 11am EST! We'll be exploring strkBTC and privacy Bitcoin with @Ingalandia from @Starknet! 🍕 Also, talking our joint Pizza Day event together 🎉

What does private Bitcoin actually look like? -> Bridge BTC into Starknet. -> Receive strkBTC. -> Shield it in your @ready__x or @xverse wallet. -> Swap, earn, and move privately. Watch the full walkthrough 👇

What NEAR shipped this month: ✦ NEAR Intents crossed $19B+ in all-time volume and 25M+ total swaps. ✦ Confidential Payments went live on with Universal Send. ✦ $VVV is live on NEAR Intents and ✦ Illia Polosukhin (@ilblackdragon) and Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) discussed the Privacy Renaissance on @therollup. ✦ NEAR AI and the Government of Bermuda partnered to deploy AI-powered public services. ✦ NEAR Intents began powering cross-chain swaps in Ledger Wallet. ✦ IronClaw released version v0.28 “IronClaw Reborn”. ✦ NEAR Intents integrated private USDC payments for the NEAR AI Agent Market. ✦ NEAR Intents
 joined the strkBTC Federation. ✦ NEAR AI shipped automatic PII anonymization. ✦ NEAR introduced Dynamic Resharding. ✦ NEAR AI and FailSafe launched AttackBench. ✦ NEAR hosted events at Consensus Miami and the SALT Digital Finance Forum in Bermuda. ✦ referrals went live ✦ The Bitwise NEAR Staking ETP drew roughly $3M in inflows ✦ Trezu (@trezuapp) launched confidential treasuries And much more.