# Privacy Without UX Friction: for Assets, Transaction and IP Data by Koreli Bros || EPS 2025 Workshop - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 17:00 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, privacy stack, devconnect, 2025, eps25, pse, privacy stewards of ehtereum, ethereum foundation, ef, Education - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-ta7YJZ9gPAg - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7YJZ9gPAg ## Description Nika Koreli (Hinkal), Georgi Koreli (Hinkal) talks about users experience with Privacy. In their opinion the users interface is main pillar of mass adoption and say more tools should be developed with User's experience in mind. Ethereum Privacy Stack is a global privacy summit during Devconnect 2025 bringing together Ethereum builders, protocol maintainers, and advocates. Featuring Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, Andy Guzman, Polymutex, Ameen Soleimani, and 30+ speakers on 2 stages, celebrating privacy acceleration. Ethereum Privacy Stack: http://eps25.web3privacy.info Organized by Web3Privacy Now & Privacy Stewards of Ethereum Web3Privacy now collective: http://web3privacy.info Privacy Stewards of Ethereum: https://pse.dev/ ## Transcript [applause] Yeah, thanks everyone for coming and joining us for a privacy session. And today we will start with user experience of privacy. Privacy has been a very sensitive topic over the past few years. But the main problem of privacy was that uh it was not coming from user experience standpoint. So it was standalone fragment experience that didn't allow mass adoption of privacy um as a as a segment overall and now over the past few years we we've been working to make privacy usable and actually embedding privacy in your wallet user experience so you can access any transaction any DB on Ethereum any EVM chains without sacrificing or fragmenting your user experience on main chains. So what Hingle provides is privacy without UX friction for assets, transaction and IP data. So we can start with the basics of privacy, right? Privacy started as a standalone coins and then they moved to uh the this experience on Ethereum where you can deposit assets and withdraw and this is problematic user experience for privacy because you have to be desperate to really want this type of experience because what you actually do uh when you make this transaction is like let's say you want to shield if you depos you first split the assets right to have um equal anonymity And then you have to wait for some time and then uh after you wait you have to withdraw right. This experience is associated with um capital inefficiency and additional clicks right. So you cannot earn yield. you cannot swap or like make uh transaction as like that you want and you have to click lots of button to make sure that your wallet have has privacy and uh hingle solves this problem and uh again uh another problem that I haven't mentioned now is anonymity set right so if your user experience is split and fra privacy is fragmented it means that it's very hard to build anonymity set of shielded pool because you're just a fraction of end user experience of the customers. So, Hinko solved this problem in the most elegant way. Uh, we've been working to make privacy invisible. So, it's a wallet level privacy that allows you for full privacy of your asset transaction and IP data with store integration. So this is realized on the wallet extension level and with dual side account. So it means that you have private wallet which is a shielded pool and you have unlimited number of public accounts that you can attach to it. For private wallet, what you do is you use it for um like any stateless transaction and stateless transactions are transactions like swaps uh like PT tokens on um Pendle or any other transaction that doesn't require your wallet and the history of your previous wallet. So whenever it's detached from uh the wallet, you can make any transaction. What is the um example of stateful transaction? it's a borrowing because your health factor actually depends um on your previous transaction and the history of the wallet and since hle appears as a smart contract instead of you you can be liquidated on behalf of someone else. So that's why we abstracted this user experience and split into two different verticals. You have shielded private wallet uh that is unified wallet for all transactions you can make and for stateful transactions um you have individual wallet that you split that you create for these dups but then user experience is still holistic because uh we designed the system that prompts you to move in a seamless manner from private account to public ones and then shield back to the main. So the whole user experience is obstructed here and from a functionality standpoint as I mentioned right so you can keep any asset in full privacy. You can make fully encrypted transactions from HLO wallet to another HKO wallet. So the value is hidden and no one can see your IP data. Our first flagship product is HKO wallet extension because of its composibility uh and privacy. So we believe that privacy should have uh should be on the wallet level and everything else comes downstream from your wallet, right? So whatever your access allows you to always stay private to make sure that um you can access any apps to make sure that you can make payments. So by this extension we are covering bunch of use cases that are crucial for adoption of privacy because it's invisible. Another product that we are working on now it's HKL multisc uh it allows uh companies to collaborate in a fully private manner where signatures are private as well and hle for developers. Uh this use case we specifically focus on payments but it can be also enabled on the D5 side where you can make um you can integrate HLE SDK to basically enable privacy for any type of um you know payment solution or in trading that's what appears on chain for all HKO transactions it's HKO outgoing transaction which is a D in this case and then you know it comes back to HKL right between two HLE accounts it's HL to HLE while you maintain full self custody over your assets and HLE SDK enables developers to like three states it's private to private it's you know sender is private value is private it's encrypted and recipient as public to private, which means that you can send someone uh your Hinkle link and they don't see what you have on your wallet, right? And private to public, right? So, it's a very modular structure that allows you privacy for any use case within payments and trading um verticals. And now I'm passing to my co-founder, Nika. Hi everyone. Uh I will continue with respect to wallet architecture. Uh I presented here graph uh with a structure of our wallet. Uh I will explain how it works. So the simple thing uh you can think is that uh all of us operate from the same address doing transactions from the same address for the outsider is the same person but in reality we are different people who are doing these transactions from the same address. is functioning well. >> Uh the core of a hingle architecture is HL pool. So it's aggregated smart contract where each of the user holds his funds. Uh it may be RC20 tokens or NFTTS um that uh that is contained in this pool and uh each user holds a portion of this pool. Uh for uh for a final pool we use uh account uh sorry UTXO based architecture. Uh so each user holds UTXOS and some of UTXOS comprise a balance of each user in the pool. Uh the crucial thing is um users hold uh shielded keys. So it's additional keys to uh EVM that are outside of the system. So outside of blockchain and uh users can claim uh ownership of the assets with this shielded private key. Uh let's think uh about uh controller and uh possible actions of the user. Uh [clears throat] the controller uh will uh will manage the interaction between the user and hinkle pool. So for example, when user wants to do transaction with unis swap uh there are three type of information that he needs to provide. First it's a zk proof of the ownership of the asset. So user needs to prove that he holds some funds in the uh pool. Second one is a stealth address. Uh I will go back to stealth address a little bit later but essentially stealth addresses allows us to uh to provide privacy of the receiver. And the third component is the call data. So the normal call data you provide when you do transaction with unis swap or other smart contract. uh these three types of information is passed to the relayer. Relayers are the third parties who submit transactions on behalf of the users and uh once relayer submits this transaction uh first thing that is done is that ZK proof is verified on chain. This hingle pool releases funds to the transaction. Transaction is done. Think about swapping in unis swap and the swapped amount is deposited to the stealth address provided during the transaction and uh so the swapped amount is linked to the stealth address of the user and all this UTXO is deposited to the hingle pool. This is a normal transaction in HLE. [snorts] Uh I would like to separate uh two types of transactions in HLE pool. uh you uh Georgia mentioned it before. It's stateless transactions and stateful transactions. I will define it. Uh so stateless transactions is transactions where the outcome depends only on call data. So the outcome doesn't depend on some state of smart contracts or the blockchain. Think about swap. When you do it with unis swap, the outcome depends only so the outcome depends on the call data. it doesn't depend on your some personal state uh hidden in smart contract. So with the same call data you get the same result. Uh and the second type of action is a stateful actions where um the outcome of the transaction depends on the hidden state in smart contract. Think about when you stake on curve and then get reward. Your reward depends on the am the length the period length you hold the asset in the curve pool. So your current outcome depends on the past history. This type of transaction we are called stateful transactions. For stateful transactions users need to uh have history. So they need to have reputation. When you staked some tokens on a curve pool and hold these tokens in the pool for let's say 10 days, the outcome of the reward depends on the length of the uh of this period. Uh for stateful transactions, users uh have the smart contract accounts where they perform the actions and holds the history. But for stateless transactions, user can perform um transactions directly from the pool. So uh for outsiders it means that they cannot distinguish between two people who are doing swaps. Either it's the first person or the second person. The innovation we brought here is uh simple. So previously all the interactions were done through adapters. Adapters were smart contracts designed for specific interaction. Let let's think about unis swap adapter or curve adapter or beefy adapters. People were writing adapters for each interaction. uh we abstracted it. So we removed all the adapters. So the users are making their transactions directly from the hidden uh shielded pool. Uh for this reason we introduced uh different type of UTXO. It's called uh approved UTXO. So they uh so they represent approval state of the hidden of the shielded pool towards some contract. Think about approved tokens to let's say unis swap contracts. This this is a different state than normal UTX. So that were representing the balances of the uh of the users in the smart contract. With this approved UTXO, users are able directly to approve some amounts of token towards smart contracts and then do transactions. For example, you first approve some amount to the unis swap smart contract and then do smart uh swap uh swap transaction. Sorry. Uh now now I will go to cryptographic primitives that we use in our protocol. So uh we start from uh uh from the baby job curve elliptic curve. Um we need this for cryptographic operations done in the uh pool uh and also for uh stealth addresses because we need to prove ownership of stealth address of the user. Uh second one is uh very standard pos uh hashing. So uh when you do UTXO commitment you need to hash some amount ownership and address and to produce commitments that is stored on chain. And the third um the third primitive is uh ZK snark protocol growth 16 golden start note for ZK proofs for fast verification of ZK proofs. uh here I will go deeper to the stealth addresses uh and why they help us in the protocol. >> So uh let me give you a simple example when you do swap in unis swap the amount is uncertain because there there can be some other swaps before you in the same block. So you never know what will be the total swapped amount of the transaction and this is important because you need to capture the amount that you swapped and deposit back to the shielded pool. So users should be able to generate one-time addresses for each type of transactions and this one type of addresses should be independent for outsiders but should be linked to the same key for the owner of the UTXOs and this is exactly what uh sales addresses are helping us to achieve. uh stealth addresses were implemented with respect to smart contracts accounts EOAS but they were not implemented within smart contract uh like is done in HKL and this is what we are doing. I will briefly describe how they work. So uh everyone here is familiar with DF helmon um asymmetric cryptography. So um we have public key private key and uh we have some cryptographic operation to derive public key from the private key. Stealth addresses allowed to have multiple public key for the same private key. So think about generation of public key for every transaction for outsiders as I mentioned it uh they are not linkable with each other but essentially they originate from the same address. I've mentioned many times in the past. >> Okay, we are unfortunately at the time. So, I'm wrapping right now. So, it's um we have a team of 20 people. Uh Nikai is CTO, he has PhD. Um I'm CEO. I was twice world champion in sambar wrestling. Um graduate from Stanford and spent lots of time and investment banking and hedge funds. Um and yes, please download HLO on your money in any form of yield and make sure that the your entry point to blockchains is HO wallet. Thank you.