Hinkal: Anonymity Achieved
Supporting an innovative crypto protocol in its ambitions to guarantee private transaction across blockchains with various products.
About Hinkal
Hinkal is a protocol that provides a unique on-chain data security layer that ensures complete anonymity for financial transactions and assets. Inspired by the rich and diverse ingredients of Georgia's khinkali dumplings, Hinkal offers a personalized financial experience by keeping users' transactions and assets private. The platform's ease of use and intuitive interface make it accessible to everyone, even those without technical expertise. Hinkal's core offering includes the Hinkal App and Hinkal SDK which allow EVM dApps and wallets to integrate privacy seamlessly without changing existing smart contracts.
Hinkal's relationship with Mad Devs began in Silicon Valley at Draper University, where Georgi Koreli, one of Hinkal's founders, met Oleg Puzanov, Mad Devs' CSO and co-founder. The two entrepreneurs found they shared values, and when Hinkal needed blockchain and crypto expertise to realize their plans, Mad Devs was ready to offer them an expert team to bring their dreams to reality.
Challenges & Solutions
Companies involved in the crypto and blockchain industries engage in complicated and ambitious initiatives that pave the way for new methods and technologies. Hinkal is no exception and approached Mad Devs with exciting plans regarding interest-bearing tokens and protocols to ensure anonymity for transactions across all blockchains. Our team assessed the client's needs to understand the complexity of the task ahead. This required putting our experts' extensive theoretical knowledge of blockchains into practice through studying and preparation. The team also needed to acquaint themselves with Hinkal's large code base that employed various instruments.
With anonymity at the heart of Hinkal's mission, our experts needed to ensure that Hinkal's users could complete all their transactions while remaining unidentifiable to outsiders. This requirement accompanies our team in every task with Hinkal, and thanks to our experience on projects with Lido and RociFi, Mad Devs has the knowledge to tackle the tasks Hinkal brings to us.
Challenge
Hinkal wanted their users to invest in an interest-bearing token and gain any interest earned without identifying themselves. Theoretically, someone could receive the original amount they had invested, but the interest they accrued would have been difficult to claim. This was a unique problem because no one had ever been interested in this before Hinkal.
Solution
The Mad Devs team proposed a novel solution to use bonds that reflected the initial price users wanted to invest. They could cash in the bonds to get the original amount with any interest. To make this work, the team optimized the zero-knowledge proof testing process by adding new cases to account for this paradigm.
Interest-bearing tokens are cryptocurrencies or digital assets that accrue interest over time, similar to traditional savings accounts. They are commonly part of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, using blockchain technology to automate and secure interest payments. Users deposit their tokens into staking protocols, which generate interest through staking. The process is transparent, with real-time interest tracking. Interest-bearing tokens blend traditional finance principles with blockchain innovation.
Challenge
Hinkal wanted to ensure private cross-chain bridging so its users could transfer funds between instances of the Hinkal protocol across the chains where it is deployed. This means keeping information safe across platforms such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or Coinbase Base.
Solution
To give Hinkal users privacy in cross-chain transfers, the team created a process in which users craft folded zero-knowledge proofs. The first proves that the user has the funds they wish to send, and the second proves ownership of the funds that will be received. The team also created an emergency liquidity buffer that holds the funds to prevent them from being lost if the bridge cannot deliver metadata.
Challenge
Hinkal's users wanted to use the Pendle.Finance platform, a specific DeFi application that functions as a permissionless yield-trading protocol. The challenge were the complex financial instruments it uses at its core, such as Yield Tokenization (YT tokens) and Time-Decaying assets.
Solution
The team created an environment for validating and extensively testing the platform's logic to ensure that a web browser correctly interprets Hinkal's work with Pendle without closing the window due to extended loading times. Now, users can manage and trade yield-bearing assets by tokenizing them into principal and yield components.
Key results
Technology stack
Solidity
Zero-knowledge proofs
Circom
Hardhat
Meet the team
Mamed Nuriev
Managing Partner, Web3 Delivery Manager
Anton Kozlov
Senior Software engineer
Review from client
I highly recommend Mad Devs. They brought skilled and diligent engineers to our project. It was easy to communicate with the team and discuss changes and new ideas. They value transparency, and we enjoyed it.
Future plans
Looking forward, Hinkal aims to expand its functionality by
Support cross-chain transactions: Allow users to execute private transactions across different chains and stake tokens while remaining private. Implement shared privacy: Introduce a restaking coordination layer to secure cross-chain shared privacy. Dark pool: Offer private on-chain strategies, secure asset transfers, and protection against onchain tracking.