Private Payments Are Live on Polygon

Today we're launching private payments through the Polygon wallet via Hinkal, using zero-knowledge proofs to verify every transfer.

Starting now, users can send stablecoins on the Polygon network without publishing the sender, the receiver, or the amount onchain.

Confidentiality has been the single biggest gap between onchain rails and what institutional finance actually needs to move serious stablecoin volume. Banks, treasuries, and payments teams already live with confidentiality on traditional rails. 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.

We built this in collaboration with Hinkal, the shielded-pool privacy protocol that handles the cryptography behind every private transfer. Hinkal routes transactions through a shielded pool and uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify them without exposing sender, receiver, or amount. The protocol is non-custodial: funds never sit with Hinkal or with any party during a transfer. Pairing Hinkal's privacy layer with the Polygon network's speed and cost is what makes confidential stablecoin payments practical at the scale enterprise teams need.

For institutional finance, that means keeping the speed and cost of onchain settlement without giving up the confidentiality they get from traditional rails today.

For app developers building on the Polygon network, it means a new default you can offer your users: any app integrated with the Polygon wallet can flip on private payments and let their users send stablecoins privately, with no new infrastructure to stand up.

For users, it means sending shielded stablecoin payments, without hassle.

This upgrade gives users privacy by default and a faster path to serving institutions that wouldn't have touched a public chain before.

The problem we set out to solve

Every stablecoin transfer on a public blockchain publishes three facts to the world:

• who sent it
• who received it, and
• how much moved

For a treasury team paying vendors, a fintech running payroll, or a business settling internal flows across entities, that exposure is a real operational problem. Public chains deliver the speed, cost, and 24/7 availability that traditional banking rails don't. They also broadcast the details of every payment to every observer on the network.

That trade-off has kept serious enterprise volume offchain. We heard it from partners across payments, payroll, and treasury: confidentiality is not a feature request, it is a prerequisite. Private Payments is our first step toward closing the gap.

How it works

Inside wallet.polygon.technology, users now see a "Privately Send" option alongside the standard send flow.

When a user selects that option, the transfer routes through a shielded pool instead of a standard onchain transfer. Zero-knowledge proofs confirm the math without exposing sensitive financial data. Outside observers can verify that a valid transfer occurred. They cannot see the participants or the amount. Senders and receivers are not linkable onchain.

Three properties matter for enterprise teams:

1. Every transfer is verified cryptographically. Confidentiality is a property of the zero-knowledge proof. Competitors, counterparties, and the public see only that a valid transfer occurred on the network.
2. Screening is built into the flow. Every private transaction passes through KYT (Know Your Transaction) screening before execution. Privacy means opacity to the market, not opacity to regulators.
3. No one takes custody mid-transfer. Funds move directly between wallets through the protocol. No server or operator holds or controls the assets during the transfer.

Who this is for

We built private payments for a specific class of enterprise risk: any stablecoin flow where a public record of sender, receiver, and amount creates competitive or operational exposure. In practice, that covers treasury transfers between legal entities, vendor and contractor payments, internal fund movements across business units, and settlement between counterparties that don't want their relationships on a public ledger.

Traditional banking rails deliver this confidentiality by default. Wire transfer details are not public record. But banks settle slowly, charge high fees, and operate on limited hours.

Onchain settlement inverts that equation: faster, cheaper, always on — and, too often, exposed. Private payments brings the missing piece to payment teams using the Polygon network.

Where this fits in what we're building

Private payments on wallet.polygon is the first user-facing privacy capability we've shipped at the wallet layer, delivered in partnership with Hinkal. It's one piece of a broader direction we expect to expand across the Open Money Stack: privacy as a core capability.

We're working on more privacy offerings to complement the wallet and will share specifics as each piece is ready.

Try it

Private payments are live today for USDC and USDT on wallet.polygon. If your team moves stablecoins at scale and needs transaction confidentiality without giving up the speed and cost of onchain settlement, we built this for you.

Try private payments on wallet.polygon.technology →