Stealth-to-scale marketing // Cat maxi // Currently @citrea_xyz
Joined July 2014
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3x from here and hyperliquid:native FDV reaches ETH’s
Your best content this week is probably sitting in your team's standup notes.
Release in the works? Tease it.
Interesting stat? Share it.
Big technical challenge solved? Explain it.
Simply turn internal team updates into external news.
Writing a press release forces brutal product and GTM clarity.
A single headline has to carry months of engineering work and hundreds of pages of docs.
In one page, you define the problem, the tension, the category, and the ask.
Most teams never do this, then wonder why the story stays fuzzy.
The moment you feel exhausted from repeating your narrative is usually the exact moment the market is just starting to hear it.
Subtle signs of a successful product or narrative launch (beyond metrics like impressions and retweets):
1. Your AI footprint resets
Google your brand name and run it through different AI models. If Google’s AI Overview doesn’t reflect your new framing within 72 hours, your distribution didn't pierce the noise.
2. An intentional audience shift happens
Follower analytics rarely stay the same after a genuine narrative shift. Look at your audience insights to see if the launch attracted your actual target persona or geography. Citrea, for example, saw an immediate shift toward the US and Germany following our privacy rollout: two regions that heavily prioritize on-chain privacy.
3. Competitor posture changes quietly
A successful launch forces rivals to update their messaging, counter-position against your new feature, or become defensive. When you see changes in competitor comparison tables, homepage copy, and founder tweets, your launch forced their hand.
4. Your vocabulary gets adopted verbatim
When prospects, community members, and users start quoting your exact phrasing to explain their own problems, positioning succeeded. When they describe your product using your coined terms, the narrative broke out and stuck.
5. Unprompted inclusion in analyst notes, newsletters, and builder feeds
You know a narrative broke through when independent researchers, newsletter writers, and industry creators break down your architecture or cite your benchmark without being pitched. When third parties explain your launch to their audience for free, you've built real category gravity.
None of this happens by accident.
It is the tedious, unglamorous work of radical message discipline, coordinating paid and organic PR, activating your network and existing supporters, aligning every touchpoint, and repeating the same three core ideas across docs, founder posts, and AMAs until you're completely sick of hearing yourself speak.
The moment you feel exhausted from repeating your narrative is usually the exact moment the market is just starting to hear it.
How you treat people on their way out is a reflection of you and your culture.
This is Eli’s public farewell message to a longtime employee who is leaving - so appreciative and genuine.
Too many founders can barely offer an awkward "best of luck" to the people who helped build their business.
Take the extra five minutes to publicly recognize those who contributed to your journey.
Dear @AbdelStark , the number one reason I get up in the morning eager for another day at StarkWare is the amazing team we have. Combination of gigantic brain, ambitious vision and values worth fighting for: integrity, human dignity and freedom.
A team is a collection of people, and you are one of the best examples of what StarkWare is:
Time and again you led the way — Bitcoin and freedom tech, Privacy, and most recently AI and the agentic economy and the safety challenges it poses.
Add to that you’re amazing charisma and technical power, single handedly willing full ecosystems and products to existence.
But above all it’s your big spirit and seeing how the values of human freedom and dignity are your beacons of light and North Star.
I feel more optimistic that AI won’t kill us all now that you’re working full time on saving us all.
Best wishes for your next chapter and I’m sure ZK STARKs and Starknet will play a role in AI safety too, so our paths will cross again.
Love respect and admiration, Sir!
Some privacy lore behind this photo
My professional journey in crypto started right around the Tornado Cash sanctions when I began working with the Chainway Labs team, and on-chain privacy immediately became our first obsession.
The existential threat to on-chain privacy bothered the team so much that they locked in on whiteboard sessions to build a solution where privacy could co-exist with compliance. That’s how Proof of Innocence was built.
I feel so lucky to have witnessed the team’s commitment and @ekrembal’s brilliance with cryptography and zero-knowledge circuits.
The idea that users could mathematically prove their funds are not linked to illicit addresses without revealing their identity was breakthrough tech and the team open-sourced the entire framework for the space.
It went viral overnight and got covered by @TheBlockCo and @Bankless, and caught the attention of researchers across the space - leading to Vitalik reaching out to talk tech.
While the team didn’t turn that public good into a product at the time, they continued to be involved in the privacy landscape while building the foundations on Bitcoin.
It feels right to bring everything the team learned from frontier ZK research and privacy to Bitcoin via @crest_btc!
Super excited for the upcoming launch!
Subtle signs of a successful product or narrative launch (beyond metrics like impressions and retweets):
1. Your AI footprint resets
Google your brand name and run it through different AI models. If Google’s AI Overview doesn’t reflect your new framing within 72 hours, your distribution didn't pierce the noise.
2. An intentional audience shift happens
Follower analytics rarely stay the same after a genuine narrative shift. Look at your audience insights to see if the launch attracted your actual target persona or geography. Citrea, for example, saw an immediate shift toward the US and Germany following our privacy rollout: two regions that heavily prioritize on-chain privacy.
3. Competitor posture changes quietly
A successful launch forces rivals to update their messaging, counter-position against your new feature, or become defensive. When you see changes in competitor comparison tables, homepage copy, and founder tweets, your launch forced their hand.
4. Your vocabulary gets adopted verbatim
When prospects, community members, and users start quoting your exact phrasing to explain their own problems, positioning succeeded. When they describe your product using your coined terms, the narrative broke out and stuck.
5. Unprompted inclusion in analyst notes, newsletters, and builder feeds
You know a narrative broke through when independent researchers, newsletter writers, and industry creators break down your architecture or cite your benchmark without being pitched. When third parties explain your launch to their audience for free, you've built real category gravity.
None of this happens by accident.
It is the tedious, unglamorous work of radical message discipline, coordinating paid and organic PR, activating your network and existing supporters, aligning every touchpoint, and repeating the same three core ideas across docs, founder posts, and AMAs until you're completely sick of hearing yourself speak.
The moment you feel exhausted from repeating your narrative is usually the exact moment the market is just starting to hear it.
A sneak peek at consumer-facing Bitcoin privacy
Launching soon™️
Welcome to Citrea's privacy chapter.
Where Bitcoin becomes private and privacy becomes practical and usable at scale.
Join @crest_btc waitlist: crestapp.xyz/
Checklist for your content:
1. What do you want to say?
2. What’s the value to your audience?
3. What’s the gossipy element?
Most people forget the third one 💅
Home at last from Token2049 😶🌫️
- Lots of privacy conversations. Hoping to see all this privacy hype translate into actual product usage rather than just token price speculation.
- Met up with our media and vault partners in person. Big things are in motion.
- Got rekt by the haze but enjoyed Singapore’s gardens and food.
Back to oxygen and working
All the white dudes running topless during the entire Token week
You looked pretty hilarious inhaling pure PM2.5 just to flex your abs
Leaving Korea with 100% conviction in our local partners and strategy 🇰🇷
Here is what happened:
- Hosted the only privacy event in Seoul & onboarded 100+ users to test our upcoming BTC privacy tech
- Launched a BTC Earn Vault featuring institutional partners & competitive yield
- Finally met our Korea GTM partners in person after working together for a year
- Fully enjoyed the Seoul food and party scene
Next Singapore 🇸🇬
Announcing the cBTC Earn Vault with ~10% APY 🍊🍋
This is just the beginning.
Working on:
→ integrating the vault into fintech applications
→ enabling private deposits into the Earn Vault
we keep shipping at Citrea.
Introducing cBTC Earn Vault - Open for Deposits
cBTC has built a strong foundation, with $65M volume & 190 BTC processed by the Clementine Bridge.
Now, we're expanding cBTC’s utility with the Earn Vault, curated by @ClearstarLabs.
~10% APY including CTR incentives 🧵
Auto-shielding...
Public balance detected
Was the key takeaway from @citrea_xyz's privacy event today.
Sneak peek at what's coming with @crest_btc ↓
Here in Seoul to meet you 🇰🇷
This is my first KBW. DM me if you want to connect and talk growth & GTM!
Here are a few events I’ll be attending:
- Liquidity evening by @turtledotxyz and @LunarStrategy
- Institutional Privacy Day by @citrea_xyz
- BLOCKFESTA by @with_blockmedia
- EASYCON Seoul by @Coiniseasy
- KBW Creators Night by @KaitoAI and @DeSpreadTeam
- Starkmart by @Starknet
In between events, I’ll be exploring local Korean food and doing K-beauty runs. Hit me up if you want to tag along! 💅🏾
Tugce | Citrea 🍊🍋 retweeted
Institutional Privacy Day
Panel 1: Institutional Standards for DeFi Liquidity
Featuring an elite lineup:
- Nick See Tong (@Nibel_eth), @base
- Olaf Kudinov, @1inch
- Adam Morgan McCarthy (@AdMcMarkets), @lo_tech
- Moderator: Tugce Smith (@tugcesmith), Citrea
Very rarely in marketing do you get the privilege of promoting a product that you genuinely need yourself.
I’ve been in this space since 2019. Over the last several years, I witnessed user experience across almost every category improve drastically.
Except privacy.
Wallets, onboarding, custody, cross-chain communication - everything became faster, cleaner, and more intuitive.
But privacy remained the most uncharted, under-developed, and hyper-technical corner of the entire industry.
I'm super excited to be working on the hardest and most neglected problem in the industry:
Consumer-facing Bitcoin privacy
Citrea acquires Crest to bring Zcash-style privacy to Bitcoin
@crest_btc, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet, becomes Citrea’s flagship product.
Uniting our teams to make privacy the standard for holding and moving a $1.6T store of value. 🧵
1/6
Tugce | Citrea 🍊🍋 retweeted
Citrea acquires Crest to bring Zcash-style privacy to Bitcoin
@crest_btc, a self-custodial private Bitcoin wallet, becomes Citrea’s flagship product.
Uniting our teams to make privacy the standard for holding and moving a $1.6T store of value. 🧵
1/6