Shield your funds

Move value from a public wallet into the shielded pool. This is the boundary between the public world and your private book, and the one step worth doing deliberately.

Shield the native asset, buy the rest inside

A deposit is the one part of your activity a watcher can read, and it is per asset. Shield ETH and then buy what you want from inside the pool, and the asset you end up holding never crossed the boundary at all — it came into existence as a shielded note. Deposit is the leaky path. Swap is the clean one.

In the app

1. Open app.cowlprotocol.com, connect your wallet, and unlock.
2. Go to Shield, pick the asset and the amount. The card shows how it will cross before you approve anything.
3. Approve in your wallet. A shield is always self-paid, so this is the one operation that costs you gas directly.
4. Watch it land in Portfolio. The explorer sees a commitment.

In the CLI

cowl shield 0.1                  # native
cowl shield 5000 USDG            # any ERC-20 on the chain

cowl scan                        # sync the tree and open your notes
cowl balance --shielded          # the book only your keys can read

Plain cowl balance is the public side. A confident zero on a funded account almost always means the missing --shielded, or a scan that has not run yet, rather than lost money.

How the amount crosses

By default the deposit is split into shared denomination sizes, so the figure you deposit cannot be matched against the figure you later withdraw. A round amount crosses in one transaction; an odd one is split into several, and both clients show the plan and the total cost before anything is signed.

cowl shield 0.23 --spread 20m    # scatter the parts across twenty minutes
cowl shield 0.23 --exact         # cross at the precise amount instead