Decentralized finance (DeFi) has revolutionized financial markets but has also brought significant privacy concerns. Public blockchains expose wallet balances and transaction histories, leaving users vulnerable to frontrunning, copytrading, and theft. Traders risk losing competitive advantages, while large holders face personal security threats. As crypto adoption grows, protecting sensitive financial data has become critical for individuals and institutions navigating DeFi.

Hinkal Protocol solves this by enabling private transactions on EVM chains. Zero-knowledge technology allows users to trade, stake, and interact with dApps without exposing wallet details. Hinkal’s stealth addresses and shared privacy pools ensure full asset custody while keeping activity anonymous. Whether you’re a retail trader or an institution, Hinkal offers a simple, effective way to secure your on-chain activities.

What is Hinkal Protocol?

Source: Hinkal Website

Hinkal Protocol is a privacy-focused solution that enables secure, anonymous transactions on EVM-compatible blockchains. Using zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs) and stealth addresses, it allows users to trade, stake, yield farm, and interact with decentralized applications (dApps) without exposing wallet addresses or transaction histories. Hinkal ensures full self-custody while providing a seamless DeFi experience, making it ideal for both retail and institutional users seeking on-chain privacy.

The Mission and Vision of Hinkal Protocol

Hinkal Protocol’s mission is to restore privacy in decentralized finance by enabling secure, anonymous on-chain transactions while ensuring users retain full control of their assets. It aims to protect individuals and institutions from market manipulation, surveillance, and personal security risks. The vision of Hinkal is to make privacy a standard in DeFi, creating a financial ecosystem where users can interact freely without exposing sensitive data. By prioritizing compliance, accessibility, and self-custody, Hinkal seeks to empower everyone to engage with blockchain technology safely and privately.

Features of Hinkal Protocol

Anonymity Staking

This dApp lets users stake assets like ETH into a Shielded Pool, boosting privacy for the ecosystem while earning rewards. You get liquid privacy tokens (e.g., hETH) with no lock-ups or slashing, usable across DeFi, and collect a share of transaction fees—think shared privacy instead of shared security, scalable across chains.

Shielding

Shielding moves your assets into a cloaked address within the Shielded Pool, leveraging zkSNARKs and stealth addresses to keep them untraceable. It’s self-custodial, cross-chain compatible, and breaks the public link to your wallet, offering true privacy for DeFi moves big or small. Shielding assets involves generating a private address linked to your wallet but invisible to public explorers. This ensures that your tokens are stored privately while maintaining full custody.

Swap

Hinkal’s Swap feature enables private token exchanges via DEXs like Uniswap, using relayers and zero-knowledge proofs to hide your activity. Assets move from a shielded address, with stealth addresses adding extra obscurity, all for a tiny 0.03% fee—perfect for discreet trading without front-running risks.

Privacy

At its core, Hinkal prioritizes user privacy. The protocol allows users to store assets and perform transactions without exposing personal information on-chain. By utilizing zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs) and stealth addresses, Hinkal ensures that wallet addresses, transaction histories, and asset holdings remain confidential. This feature protects users from risks like market manipulation, frontrunning, and targeted attacks, ensuring that sensitive financial data stays private.

Composability

Hinkal is designed to be highly composable, enabling seamless integration with any decentralized application (dApp) that supports WalletConnect. Users can perform various DeFi activities, including swapping tokens, staking, yield farming (LPing), and making payments—all while maintaining complete privacy. The protocol supports transactions in any ERC-20 token, providing flexibility and ensuring users can interact with multiple DeFi platforms without sacrificing confidentiality.

Self-Custody

One of Hinkal’s fundamental principles is self-custody. Users retain full control over their assets at all times, with no intermediaries involved. The platform uses viewing keys for balance monitoring and spending keys for transaction authorization, ensuring that only the wallet owner can access and manage their tokens. This self-custody model, combined with Hinkal’s high-security standards, guarantees that users can safely store and use their funds without external interference or custodial risk.

Technology Behind Hinkal Protocol

Hinkal Protocol uses advanced cryptographic technologies to ensure privacy, security, and seamless integration with decentralized applications (dApps) on EVM-compatible blockchains. Its architecture revolves around three key components: zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs), stealth addresses, and shared privacy pools.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs) are central to Hinkal’s privacy infrastructure. They allow users to prove the validity of a transaction without revealing sensitive details like wallet addresses or transaction amounts. This means transactions can be verified by the network while remaining completely private, enabling secure DeFi participation without sacrificing transparency or compliance.

Stealth Addresses

Stealth addresses further enhance privacy by generating unique one-time addresses for each transaction. This prevents linkability between transactions and wallet addresses, ensuring that senders and receivers remain anonymous. When sent, assets are deposited into these stealth addresses, obfuscating the connection between users’ public and private wallets.

Privacy Pools

Shared privacy pools aggregate liquidity across multiple blockchains, making it difficult to trace asset flows. By pooling user transactions together, Hinkal ensures that individual transfers are indistinguishable, further enhancing privacy. This system allows users to interact with dApps, trade, stake, and yield farm while maintaining complete transaction confidentiality.

How Does Hinkal Protocol Work?

Hinkal Protocol enables private transactions through cryptographic techniques and key management systems. It operates using two main key pairs: the viewing keypair and the spending keypair.

The Viewing Keypair

The viewing keypair scans the blockchain for user-related commitments (UTXOs) and verifies whether the user has enough tokens to perform a transaction. Once verified, a zero-knowledge proof is generated, ensuring that the transaction details remain hidden.

The Spending Keypair

The spending keypair then proves ownership of the tokens, allowing the user to execute private transactions without revealing wallet addresses. To maintain privacy, Hinkal uses commitments and nullifiers.

Commitments

Commitments let users “lock” a certain amount of tokens without exposing transaction details. These are used in actions like swaps, deposits, and transfers.

Nullifiers

Nullifiers, created by applying a hash function to the commitment and private key, ensure that commitments cannot be reused, preventing double-spending.

Use Cases of Hinkal Protocol

Hinkal Protocol is designed to address the growing demand for privacy and security in decentralized finance (DeFi). Its use cases cater to institutional and retail users, offering solutions for secure payments, private financial operations, and confidential token management.

Stablecoin Payments

Privacy concerns have become more significant with the increasing use of stablecoins for everyday transactions and cross-border payments. Hinkal enables users to send and receive stablecoin payments without exposing wallet addresses or transaction histories. By integrating Hinkal, payment service providers can offer confidential transfers while maintaining compliance and transaction efficiency. This use case is particularly valuable for businesses looking to protect sensitive financial information while leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology.

Financial Operations

Institutional investors and active traders often require confidentiality to execute large trades or complex strategies without attracting market attention. Through its privacy-focused architecture, Hinkal provides a secure solution for private trading, yield farming, and liquidity provision. Institutions can integrate Hinkal programmatically into their trading platforms to perform operations without the risk of frontrunning, copy trading, or revealing sensitive asset information. This feature is essential for hedge funds, market makers, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) seeking to protect trading strategies and maintain competitive advantages.

Token Vesting

For teams, venture capitalists (VCs), and projects distributing tokens, Hinkal offers private token vesting solutions. Traditional token distributions often reveal recipient addresses and token amounts, which can lead to market speculation and unwanted scrutiny. With Hinkal, teams can vest tokens privately, ensuring that token releases to team members or investors remain confidential. This helps prevent market manipulation while respecting the privacy of stakeholders.

How to Use Hinkal Protocol

Hinkal Protocol is designed with user-friendliness in mind, enabling individuals and institutions to secure their on-chain activities in just a few simple steps. Here’s how you can get started:

Step 1: Connect Your Wallet

Begin by visiting the Hinkal Protocol website and clicking the “Connect Wallet” button. Hinkal supports a variety of wallets that are compatible with EVM chains. By connecting your wallet, you will gain access to the protocol’s dashboard, where you can view both your public wallet balances and private wallet address.

Step 2: Integrity Check

Next, you will undergo a quick integrity check to verify compliance. This step ensures the platform maintains security standards while keeping the process swift and straightforward. The check only takes a few clicks and a couple of minutes. Once completed, you will be eligible to create a private wallet and shield your assets.

Step 3: Shield Your Assets

After passing the integrity check, navigate to the “Shield Your Assets” section. Here, you can:

• View token balances in your public wallet.
• Click “Shield Assets” to transfer tokens into your private wallet.

Step 4: Send and Receive Privately

Within the “Send/Receive” section, you can:

• Copy your private wallet address for incoming transactions.
• Click “Receive and Send” to conduct private transfers without exposing wallet details.

Transactions are executed using zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs) and stealth addresses, making it impossible for external observers to trace fund movements or wallet ownership.

Step 5: Explore dApps Library

Hinkal’s integration with popular decentralized applications (dApps) allows users to perform private operations like swapping, staking, and yield farming. The dApps Library provides easy access to platforms such as:

• Uniswap, 1inch, and ODOS for token swaps.
• Lido, Convex, and Beefy for staking activities.
• Curve and Pendle for liquidity provision and yield trading.

Select a dApp from the library, connect via your private wallet, and enjoy secure interactions without revealing transaction histories.

Following these steps, you can store assets, perform transactions, and interact with DeFi platforms while keeping your financial activities private. Hinkal ensures a smooth experience, allowing you to manage your digital assets securely and anonymously.

Roadmap

Hinkal Protocol’s roadmap outlines its commitment to continuous innovation, enhanced privacy features, and expanded network support. The project has made significant strides since its launch, with a clear plan for future growth.

2023: Foundation and Launch

Hinkal was launched in 2023 with a focus on privacy and regulatory compliance. Key milestones included implementing KYC processes through platforms like Hexagate and introducing anonymization for all ERC-20 and BEP-20 tokens. These steps ensured that users could engage with DeFi platforms privately while meeting compliance standards.

2024: Expansion and Cross-Chain Privacy

Last year, Hinkal focused on expanding its reach and capabilities. Key achievements include:

• Support for 8 Networks, enhancing accessibility across multiple blockchains.
• Introduction of stealth addresses for improved transaction privacy.
• Launch of a statistics page providing users with transparency on network usage.
• Integration of cross-chain transactions and anonymity staking, enabling seamless asset transfers with enhanced privacy.
• Implementation of shared privacy pools to bolster transaction confidentiality.

2025: Advanced Privacy and Integration

Looking ahead, Hinkal aims to:

• Develop a ZK-wallet for even stronger privacy solutions.
• Enable SDK integration with major decentralized applications (dApps).
• Launch privacy APIs to allow developers to build privacy-focused applications.
• Expand shielded pools to additional blockchains, including Solana and Monad.
• Facilitate integration with major wallets for broader ecosystem support.
• Decentralize relayers, reinforcing network security and trustlessness.

Team

Hinkal Protocol is led by a team of seasoned professionals dedicated to enhancing privacy in decentralized finance (DeFi). The project is co-founded by Georgi Koreli and Nika Koreli, with Adam Zasada serving as the head of the ecosystem.

Georgi Koreli

Georgi Koreli holds two degrees from Stanford University—an MBA and a Master’s in Sustainability. His extensive background includes experience in marketing, finance (with a focus on privacy and compliance), and investing in companies across the U.S. and Ukraine.

Nika Koreli

Nika Koreli brings over 12 years of development experience, holding a BS in Computer Science and a PhD from the University of Warwick in the UK. He has built two blockchain applications and worked at Oliver Wyman, bringing technical expertise crucial to Hinkal’s development.

Fundraising

Hinkal Protocol has successfully raised $5.5 million in funding to support the development of its privacy-focused DeFi solutions. This capital injection underscores investor confidence in the project’s vision to revolutionize on-chain privacy and security. The fundraising round attracted 21 prominent investors, including leading venture capital firms and blockchain-focused funds. Notable investors include Aquanow, Blockchain Builders Fund, Blocklabs Capital Management, Draper Associates, and Draper Dragon.

Other key backers include Binance Labs, Quantstamp, NGC Ventures, Orange DAO, Web3.com Ventures, and Stanford Blockchain, among others. This broad network of supporters reflects a strong belief in Hinkal’s ability to provide essential privacy infrastructure within the decentralized finance ecosystem. With the raised funds, Hinkal aims to expand its technology stack, grow its user base, and enhance cross-chain privacy capabilities—further establishing itself as a leader in the on-chain privacy space.

Conclusion

Hinkal Protocol provides a simple yet powerful solution for ensuring privacy in decentralized finance (DeFi). Leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, stealth addresses, and self-custody features allows users to conduct transactions and manage assets without exposing sensitive information. With strong backing from leading investors and a roadmap focused on expanding privacy solutions, Hinkal is well-positioned to meet the growing demand for secure on-chain activity. As DeFi evolves, Hinkal’s commitment to privacy, usability, and innovation makes it a key player in shaping a more secure financial future.