PANews reported on May 12th that Starknet announced the launch of its privacy-preserving Bitcoin asset, strkBTC, on the Starknet network. Users can convert BTC to strkBTC in their wallets and hide parts of their balance and transaction history using the "shield" function, which can be "unshielded" at any time to restore the public balance. This feature is based on Starknet's STRK20 privacy framework, providing protocol-level privacy transfer support for any ERC-20 asset. The project emphasizes that strkBTC is "auditable privacy," and when users enable privacy, a viewing key is shared with an independent third-party auditing firm to provide a limited range of on-chain activity data under compliance requirements.