San Francisco, CA – Hinkal today announced it has been deployed to the mainnet of 6 EVM chains after successfully closing a $4.1 million funding round led by Draper Associates, with participation from esteemed investors, including Psalion, NGC Ventures, Aquanow, No limit Holdings, Orange DAO, DraperDragon and more.
Founded by Stanford grad Giorgi Koreli and his Ph.D. brother, Nika Koreli, Hinkal addresses the need for end-to-end privacy of trading strategies for liquid funds and whales. The protocol allows professional traders to run strategies on their favorite dApps in a fully private and compliant environment, saving them from copy trading and front-running.
The protocol uses stealth addresses, shielded pools, and DIDs to achieve the lowest privacy costs and high compliance level for sophisticated DeFi traders.
It’s mainly tailored for two strategies:
- Active LP/Yield framing.
- Buy-and-hold and liquidations.
Giorgi Koreli, Co-Founder of Hinkal Protocol, commented:
"Privacy was always coming at the expense of fees, compliance and usability; we are solving this by introducing a private Ethereum experience for professional traders."
Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates, stated:
"A costless and frictionless privacy layer is a crucial component for further adoption of cryptocurrencies shifting from CeFi to DeFi. The Hinkal team is building core infrastructure to make institutions comfortable using decentralized solutions, starting with trading. I am thrilled to be part of this journey with Hinkal."
With the new investment, Hinkal Protocol aims to transform the DeFi landscape by offering a secure and confidential environment for liquid funds and whales.
Hinkal absorbs EVM DApp ecosystem and launches with 6 DApp integrations and 3 functions, including swaps, liquidity provision and staking (Curve, 1 inch, Uniswap, Beefy, Convex, Odos). It plans to incorporate all major DApps in its ecosystem, with GMX and Lido coming next.
About Hinkal Protocol
Founded by Stanford grad Giorgi Koreli and his Ph.D. brother, Nika Koreli, Hinkal enables privacy of transactions and assets across core DeFi apps and functions, including trading, farming, staking, and lending through the use of stealth addresses and with high degree of compliance.
Hinkal is a ZK-based solution that provides a private smart contract wallet experience, allowing users to participate in their favorite dApps directly from their private addresses without the need to withdraw assets for obfuscation.
About Draper Associates
Draper Associates has led early-stage venture capital funding companies, including Hotmail, Skype, Baidu, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, Cruise, Carta, Webflow, Robinhood, and Coinbase. Draper Associates continues to innovate in providing capital to technology companies of all sizes and geographies. The team is based in Silicon Valley and invests in companies worldwide.
We are excited to share developments from Hinkal, a protocol enabling end-to-end privacy of trading strategies for liquid funds and whales, founded by Stanford grad Giorgi Koreli and his Ph.D. brother, Nika Koreli.
The problem
Historically, privacy protocols encountered issues with:
a) Usability: high fees due to unexpected slippage and gas during ZK-proof generation, fragmentation of liquidity on private L1s or L2s.
b) Compliance: particularly following Tornado Cash, professional traders don’t want to touch privacy protocols without KYC/DID layer.
Hinkal Protocol resolves both by:
a) Introducing
- Stealth addresses, where users receive overhead costs back to temporary addresses, thereby mitigating the problem of extra fees.
- Integration-focused smart contract design with the ability to integrate all EVM dApps and functions, enabling private Ethereum experience instead of just obfuscation technique.
b) Allowing users to choose how they prove their compliance from 6 DID/KYC protocols integrated by Hinkal, offering a superior design choice to the Privacy Pools article by Vitalik by eliminating the need to lock assets in the pool, which is crucial for trading transactions, where time impact on the alpha is crucial.
The initial focus of Hinkal is liquid funds, enabling them to run their on-chain strategies without withdrawing assets, all while fully private from Hinkal’s smart contract. With further DeFi integration, Hinkal aims to encompass the entire EVM ecosystem, allowing participation in any transactions with any DApp in full privacy.