Stabledash Live · · 20 min
Privacy Has Become Crypto's Most In-Demand Infrastructure
With 
Georgi Koreli
Key takeaways
Georgi Koreli says he started Hinkal with his brother three and a half years ago, shortly before the FTX crash set back institutional interest.
Georgi Koreli says Polygon Labs has integrated Hinkal, and he describes Hinkal as the only product that hides wallets and amounts on all the main public chains in one go.
He names payroll and PSP-to-merchant settlement as the two largest use cases, because transparent settlement lets each party see the other's balances.
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Summary
Georgi Koreli argues that settling stablecoin payments on transparent chains exposes business data, and that Hinkal can hide it on chains companies already use.
Georgi Koreli started Hinkal with his brother three and a half years ago, right after the Natickash sanctions as he put it. Institutional interest in crypto was growing at the time, and then the FTX crash happened. He now says privacy for stablecoin payments has reached its moment.
From unsexy to in demand
Georgi Koreli calls privacy the most unsexy industry of the past three years, a period when no one was actively looking for it. He describes the current moment as one he is excited about after three and a half years of waiting. He links the shift to a wider convergence: in his view, every fintech is adding stablecoins and every crypto company is becoming a bank.
“When you make a payment, like, it's even b two b payment between two entities... the recipient sees how much, what's the balance of the sender, sender sees what the balance of recipient”
Georgi KoreliWhat transparent chains leak
Georgi Koreli says that in an ordinary on-chain payment, even a B2B one, the recipient can see the sender's balance and the sender can see the recipient's. He also points to public companies such as DLOCOL: after its stablecoin announcement, he says, anyone could check its stablecoin volumes before quarterly results come out. He names payroll and PSP-to-merchant settlement as the two biggest use cases for privacy infrastructure.
According to Georgi Koreli, with Hinkal the link between wallets and the amounts stay hidden on chain while users keep the same wallets. He says this works through an SDK, including for stablecoin card payouts.
Polygon and Tron
Georgi Koreli says Polygon Labs recently announced a deal to integrate Hinkal. He describes Polygon as having an enterprise-focused team that acquired Coinme and Sequence and is bringing many Web2 companies into crypto.
He says the team never expected USDT on Tron to be so popular, but payment providers told them that was what they used. As a result, Hinkal deployed to the Tron chain.
The case against migration
Georgi Koreli contrasts this with Canton, which he says requires users to migrate. He argues that the chance a company's vendor is on Canton is close to zero, because the chain would have to bring all vendors and employees with it.
Koreli's argument is that privacy should run on the chains where payment flows already happen, not on a separate chain. He points to the Polygon integration and the Tron deployment as signs of this, and to Consensus, where he says most attendees came from the institutional side, a sign to him that real money is coming to crypto.
Polygon Labs, Canton, Consensus, and Ramp come up most.
- People
- Georgi Koreli
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- Polygon Labs
- Canton
- Consensus
- Ramp
- Coinme
- Sequence
- Hinkal
- Tether
- Dfns
