Polygon Launches Private Stablecoin Payments With Hinkal

 

Polygon, the leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, has partnered with Hinkal, a blockchain privacy protocol, to launch private stablecoin payments within its crypto wallet.

 

The partnership, according to Polygon, is aimed at bridging the gap between on chain rails and the needs of institutional finance, while facilitating private stablecoin payments among institutional clients that often process large volumes of transactions.

 

 

Talking about institutional clients, Polygon wrote on its blog, “They won't move operational flows onto a ledger that broadcasts every counterparty and every amount to every observer on the network. We've now enabled what institutions expect in the Polygon wallet”.

 

To maintain transparency, most public blockchains are designed to publicly record key transaction details, including information about the sender, the recipient, and the amount sent. While this level of transparency is unmatched, it has, however, prevented large institutions that uphold high standards of privacy from coming on chain.

 

To ensure institutional clients do not continue making this trade off, Polygon, in collaboration with Hinkal, created this stablecoin payment privacy feature that allows both retail and institutional users to make stablecoin payments within the Polygon wallet, while shielding sensitive details about the transaction, including information about the sender, the recipient, and the amount transacted.

 

To provide the best on-chain experience, this privacy feature leverages Polygon’s speed and low-cost transactions and Hinkal’s zero-knowledge proofs, which allow the shielding and routing of stablecoin payments. Since Hinkal is a non-custodial protocol, funds will always remain in the custody of users.

 

Polygon Accelerates Blockchain Expansion Efforts

The rollout of these private stablecoin payments comes a few days after social media giant Meta partnered with Polygon to enable payments to creators in the USDC stablecoin, an initiative that is expected to reach more than 160 countries before the end of the year.

 

As part of its expansion efforts and its big bet on stablecoins, Polygon acquired Coinme, a U.S.-based cryptocurrency cash exchange, in January of this year for $250 million. It has also integrated with and partnered with major traditional finance platforms, including Visa and Mastercard.