Resources

Glossary

Every term used across the Cowl docs, defined once. Technical terms are exact — this is the canonical spelling.

Term	Meaning
ZK proof	A zero-knowledge proof — proves a statement is true (a note is yours and valid) without revealing the underlying data.
Shielded pool	The ZK core where assets live as private notes. The public ledger sees only commitments.
Shielded portfolio	Your balances, positions, and cost basis while held in shielded state — readable by your keys, unreadable on-chain.
Note	A UTXO-like record encoding an amount and owner. Your shielded balance is a set of notes.
Commitment	A hash of a note stored on-chain. Proves a note exists without revealing it.
Nullifier	A value published when spending a note; marks it spent and prevents double-spends without linking to the owner.
Stealth address	A one-time receiving address only you can spend from. Deposits land unlinkable to you.
Viewing key	A private key that lets you scan for and read your own notes. Cannot spend.
View key	A read-only credential you hand a third party for scoped, selective disclosure. Cannot spend.
Selective disclosure	Revealing a scoped slice of your activity (by time, asset, or flow) to a specific party — and nothing else.
Private transfer	Moving value between shielded accounts without exposing amounts, sender, or receiver.
Shield / unshield	Moving assets into (shield) or out of (unshield) shielded state — the public/shielded boundary.
MEV	Maximal extractable value — profit bots capture by reordering or inserting transactions, e.g. sandwiching your trade.
Front-run	Placing a trade ahead of your visible pending order to profit from the price move it will cause.
Copy-trade	Mirroring a visible address's entries to ride its edge. Defeated when entries are shielded.
Gasless relayer	A service that pays gas and broadcasts your shielded transaction so no funding wallet links back to you.
Denomination	A shared size that boundary amounts travel in, so a deposit and a withdrawal cannot be matched by their figures. Client-side and always overridable.
Boundary	The two moments value crosses into or out of the pool — a shield and an unshield. The only amounts that are ever public.
Join-split	The shape of a spend: it reads two notes and writes two, which is why a single move is capped at your two largest notes.
Merge	Combining fragmented notes into larger ones so a bigger amount fits in a single spend. Indistinguishable on chain from a payment.
Turnstile	The per-token accounting cap in the pool: value cannot leave that did not enter. Reconciled against the real balance from outside.
Trade adapter	The contract that spends shielded notes, fills against public liquidity, and re-shields the result inside one atomic transaction.
Exact output	The shape every Cowl trade runs in: you name what you want to receive, and the spend side is sized to it.
Relayer float	The gas balance a relayer holds to submit spends, counted in spends rather than ether so the figure means something.
zcowl address	Your shielded payment address. Not an account anybody can watch — receiving at it puts nothing on chain in your name.
Tokenized stock	An equity represented as an on-chain token (e.g. AAPLx) that trades and settles natively on Robinhood Chain.
USDG	The stable settlement asset for trades on Robinhood Chain — a dollar peg that holds its value the whole way through the shield.
Robinhood Chain	The Arbitrum-based L2 Cowl settles on, where tokenized stocks natively live.
$COWL	The protocol token — fee discounts, governance, and buyback & burn.
Buyback & burn	Using protocol fees to buy $COWL on the market and permanently remove it from supply.