Confidential swaps and payments are now live on Hinkal Pay on Tempo. Move and settle stablecoins without exposing amounts, counterparties, or balances on-chain. Every transaction is ZK-verified, non-custodial, and Chainalysis KYT-screened before it settles.
Stablecoins have stopped being a crypto-trading primitive and become payment infrastructure. Supply passed $273B in March 2026, and real-world stablecoin payment volume doubled to roughly $400B in 2025 - about 60% of it B2B, according to Bessemer Venture Partners' April 2026 stablecoin Atlas.
That shift surfaces a problem the rails were never built to solve. On a public ledger, every transfer is fully observable: the amount, the counterparties, the timing, and the broader graph of relationships connected to each wallet over time. On traditional rails, those details are confidential by design - governed by contract, regulation, and competitive necessity. Until the same confidentiality exists on-chain, the institutions that move the largest volumes have no viable path onto public networks.
Bessemer ranks this as one of five open gaps in the stablecoin stack:
"The public nature of blockchain transactions also creates challenges. Companies don't want their competitors to see who their suppliers are and how much they're paying them, and banks and financial institutions don't want their trades to be frontrun or client data made public." - Bessemer Venture Partners, Stablecoins: from DeFi primitive to global financial infrastructure
In the same piece, Bessemer names Hinkal as a solution - letting enterprises keep stablecoin amounts, counterparties, and balances confidential across major chains through a single integration. Hinkal Pay is how that works in practice: commercial confidentiality between counterparties, selective disclosure to the right party at the right time, and integration into the workflows institutions already run.
Tempo, the payments-purpose-built L1 backed by Paradigm and Stripe, made the problem concrete in its own words:
"Today's stablecoin networks still broadcast everything publicly by default. A company running payroll would publish every salary. A payment processor settling with merchants would leak confidential volume data on every onchain transaction." - Tempo, Privacy on Tempo
Its conclusion is the principle this launch is built on: the parties to a transaction should see the details, the broad public should not - without giving up the usability and interoperability of stablecoin rails. That is settlement privacy, and it is the standard Hinkal Pay was built to meet.
Tempo's own answer is Zones: dedicated execution environments for managed flows like payroll, treasury, settlement, and tokenized deposits, where a defined set of participants transact confidentially while assets stay interoperable with Tempo Mainnet. Tempo is also clear that Zones are not the whole answer - "privacy is not a one-size-fits-all" - and points enterprises to other solutions on Tempo where those fit better.
Hinkal Pay is one of those solutions. It covers the flows that do not need a dedicated environment, added directly to the workflows teams already operate - no new infrastructure, no separate operators, no moving every participant into one place. Confidential transfers are live at launch in PathUSD (a Tempo-native stablecoin), USDT0, and Bridged USDC (USDC.e via Stargate).
Every transaction through Hinkal Pay is ZK-verified, non-custodial, and Chainalysis KYT-screened before settlement. Each transfer is proven valid to the network - sufficient balance, every protocol rule satisfied - without revealing the underlying details. Addresses are screened before a transfer settles, not flagged after the fact, so confidentiality is extended to legitimate users and not made available as a vector for illicit flows.
Compliance and privacy are the same problem viewed from two sides. Viewing keys grant selective disclosure to auditors, compliance teams, or counterparties when required - the same principle Tempo articulated: the parties see the details, the broad public does not.
Confidential swaps and payments on Tempo are live on Hinkal Pay today.
