Polygon Labs launched private stablecoin payments inside its consumer wallet on Monday, adding a shielded transfer option built in collaboration with privacy protocol Hinkal.
The feature, available now for USDC and USDT, lets users send stablecoins on Polygon without publishing the sender, receiver, or amount onchain, according to a blog post from Polygon Labs. Transfers route through a Hinkal shielded pool and are verified using zero-knowledge proofs, with outside observers able to confirm a valid transfer occurred but unable to see the participants or the size.
Polygon Labs framed the launch as a play for institutional payment flows that have remained off public chains due to transparency concerns. The team wrote that confidentiality has been the single biggest gap between onchain rails and what institutional finance actually needs to move serious stablecoin volume, citing treasury teams, fintechs running payroll, and businesses settling internal flows across entities as target users.
Inside the Polygon wallet, users now see a "Privately Send" option alongside the standard send flow. Selecting it routes the transfer through Hinkal's shielded pool rather than executing as a standard onchain transfer.
Three properties are central to the design, per the blog post. Every transfer is cryptographically verified via zero-knowledge proof, every private transaction passes through Know Your Transaction (KYT) screening before execution, and the protocol is non-custodial, meaning no operator holds the assets during the transfer.
Polygon Labs added that privacy in this context means opacity to the market, not opacity to regulators, addressing the compliance question that has historically dogged shielded-pool designs.
The launch lands amid a broader institutional push by Polygon Labs around its Open Money Stack initiative, which has seen a string of payments-focused announcements recently, including a Visa partner settlement integration and a Meta deal to use USDC on Polygon for creator payouts in Colombia and the Philippines.
The momentum has been building since Polygon Labs acquired Coinme and Sequence in January to round out its regulated fiat access and wallet infrastructure stack. Polygon Labs said the Hinkal integration is the first user-facing privacy capability shipped at the wallet layer and signaled more privacy offerings are in the works across the stack.
This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.