Hinkal gives wallets private balances for stablecoin settlement

Hinkal, founded in 2023 and incubated at the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, gives existing wallets a private balance on public blockchains. The company reports it has settled more than $1 billion in stablecoins privately, including $187 million in June.

Georgi Koreli, co-founder and CEO, noted that the public nature of most ledgers prevents institutions from routing large stablecoin flows on-chain. He cited industry figures that stablecoins moved about $46 trillion on-chain last year and that organic activity, after excluding bot and exchange traffic, was roughly $9 trillion.

Hinkal creates a private balance inside a smart contract on the same chain and keeps control with the user’s existing wallet keys. Users deposit from their regular wallet; after deposit, amounts, counterparties and balance histories are not visible on the public ledger. Settlement records remain verifiable on-chain. Participants can grant read-only viewing keys to regulators, auditors or counterparties to reveal specific activity when required.

Payments can move into a private balance from a public wallet, from private balance to private balance via a relayer so senders do not appear, from private balance out to a public address while keeping the sender confidential, or between two public wallets with Hinkal breaking the link between deposit and withdrawal. The protocol removes public counterparty addresses from the transaction graph.

Compliance checks run at deposit. Hinkal integrates Chainalysis screening to block sanctioned or high-risk addresses before funds enter the confidential contract. Disclosure to authorities is handled through the viewing-key mechanism.

Technically, Hinkal operates as a ZK-shielded overlay and uses hybrid elements to stay on existing public rails. The platform supports Ethereum, Solana, Tron and major EVM chains. Koreli warned that privacy-native chains and some cryptographic or hardware approaches can require moving liquidity off those networks or add other trust assumptions.

The Integration Suite offers an SDK and API for wallets, fintechs and enterprises; the API runs cryptographic work inside Hinkal’s secure enclave while the SDK gives teams control of user-facing flows. Consumer options include a web payments app, an enterprise product for batch payouts and treasury workflows, and a private wallet. Partners including Polygon and The Vault are testing integrations.

Institutions cite regulatory risk and operational readiness as adoption questions. Hinkal points to independent security audits, deposit screening and selective disclosure as responses. Integration work adapts deposit and private-balance flows and can include a forward-deployed Hinkal engineer during rollout.

Citi has outlined a bull-case stablecoin market near $4 trillion and Standard Chartered projects about $2 trillion by 2028. Koreli summarized the company’s position: “Privacy and compliance are two sides of the same problem.”