On November 21, Hinkal Protocol announced that it had been deployed to the mainnet of six EVM chains after successfully completing a $4.1 million funding round led by Draper Associates. The financing also saw participation from well-known investors such as Psalion, NGC Ventures, Aquanow, No limit Holdings, Orange DAO, DraperDragon and others.
Hinkal was founded by Stanford University graduate Giorgi Koreli and his brother, Dr. Nika Koreli. Hinkal is dedicated to solving the end-to-end privacy needs of liquid funds and large trade strategies. The protocol allows professional traders to run strategies on their favorite dApps in a completely private and compliant environment, shielding them from copycat and front-end trading. The protocol uses stealth addresses, privacy pools, and decentralized identities (DID) to achieve minimal privacy costs and high compliance levels to meet the needs of sophisticated DeFi traders.
The protocol is mainly customized for two strategies:
1. Active Liquidity Provider/Yield Farming Strategy (Active LP/Yield farming):This strategy aims to earn profits by actively participating in liquidity provision and mining. By using the Hinkal protocol, traders can run this strategy in a private and compliant environment, avoiding the risks of copywriting and front-end trading.
2. Buy-and-hold and liquidations strategy:This strategy involves buying an asset and holding it for the long term, or liquidating it for a profit under certain conditions. Hinkal Protocol can help traders run such strategies in a private and compliant environment to ensure privacy and compliance of their trading strategies.
"Privacy has always come at the expense of high cost, compliance, and usability; we solve this problem by introducing a private Ethereum experience for professional traders,"commented Giorgi Koreli, co-founder of Hinkal Protocol.
Tim Draper, founder of Draper Associates, said: A cost-free, frictionless privacy layer is critical to the further adoption of cryptocurrencies from centralized finance (CeFi) to decentralized finance (DeFi). The Hinkal team is building the core infrastructure , enabling institutions to comfortably use decentralized solutions, starting with transactions. I’m excited to embark on this journey with Hinkal.”
With this new investment, Hinkal Protocol aims to improve the DeFi experience by providing a secure and confidential environment for liquidity and large players.
Hinkal has supported the EVM dApp ecosystem and launched 6 dApp integrations and 3 features including exchange, liquidity provision and staking (Curve, 1 inch, Uniswap, Beefy, Convex, Odos). It plans to integrate all major dApps in its ecosystem, with GMX and Lido coming next.
The privacy agreement has encountered the following problems:
a) Availability: Fragmentation of liquidity on private L1 or L2 due to unexpected slippage and high gas fees during generation of zero-knowledge proofs.
b) Compliance: Especially after Tornado Cash, professional traders are reluctant to touch privacy protocols without a KYC/DID layer.
Hinkal Protocol solves both of these problems in the following ways:
a) Introducing Stealth addresses, users return additional fees to temporary addresses, thereby alleviating the problem of additional fees. With an integration-focused smart contract design, all EVM dApps and functionality can be integrated for a private Ethereum experience, not just obfuscation technology.
b) Hinkal allows users to choose how to prove their compliance from the 6 DID/KYC protocols it integrates, which provides users with better design choices. Compared to the approach mentioned in Vitaliks Privacy Pools article, Hinkals design eliminates the need to lock assets in a pool. This is critical for trading because time is critical to the impact of alpha.
Hinkal will initially focus on secondary liquidity funds as clients, enabling them to run strategies on-chain without withdrawing assets and maintaining privacy entirely through Hinkal’s smart contracts. With further DeFi integrations, Hinkal aims to encompass the entire EVM ecosystem, enabling users to participate in transactions on any DApp with complete privacy.
About Hinkal Protocol
Founded by Stanford graduate Giorgi Koreli and his brother, Dr. Nika Koreli, Hinkal enables transaction and asset privacy across core DeFi applications and functionality, including trading, mining, staking, lending, and more.
Hinkal is a ZK technology-based solution that provides users with a private smart contract wallet experience where users can interact with their favorite dApps directly from their private addresses without having to withdraw assets in order to obfuscate transactions.
About Draper Associates
Draper Associates has led early-stage venture capital companies including Hotmail, Skype, Baidu, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitch, Cruise, Carta, Webflow, Robinhood and Coinbase, among others. Draper Associates continues to innovate in funding technology companies of all sizes and geographies. The team is based in Silicon Valley and invests in companies globally.
