Private trading
Holding privately is table stakes. The killer feature is trading privately — opening, sizing, and closing positions without broadcasting a single move.
Shielded execution
A Cowl trade keeps your identity and balances shielded end to end. You prove — in zero knowledge — that you hold the input notes, and a single atomic transaction spends them, fills against public liquidity for the exact amount you asked to receive, and re-shields the result as a fresh note. The fill touches the open market, but it lands as one transaction tied to no address, so there is no pending order sitting in the mempool for a bot to read and jump.
Atomic means what it says. The adapter has no sweep and no half-state: revert anywhere in the chain and the trade never happened, with your notes untouched. Nothing of yours can be stranded inside it.
How the fill is found
- Exact output. The protocol is exact-output shaped underneath: you name what you want to receive and the spend side is sized to it. Both clients let you type either side — a pay-side figure just gets quoted first and the answer becomes the exact output.
- Every fee tier is scanned. Quotes check all four Uniswap V3 tiers and take the best executable answer, and the winning tier rides into the trade itself. That is what makes assets routable when their only pool sits on an unusual tier, and it regularly finds a cheaper one than a pinned default would.
- Token to token routes itself. A pair with no direct pool runs as two private trades through the native asset. Between the legs the value sits as a shielded note, so nothing unshields in the middle and nothing lands in a public wallet.
- You choose the gas payer.Gasless by default, with the relayer’s fee bound into the proof, or self-paid with a small headroom the adapter refunds to whoever submitted. A steep fee share says so out loud before you approve.
What the chain records
One transaction, submitted by a relayer, spending commitments and writing new ones. The swap leg is visible on the venue the way any swap is. What is not there: your address, your balance before or after, whether this was an entry or an exit, and whether the same person made the last one.
What stays hidden
| Signal | Public trade | Cowl |
|---|---|---|
| Position size | Visible | Hidden |
| Entry / exit timing | Visible | Hidden |
| Direction (buy / sell) | Visible | Hidden |
| Your address | Visible | Never touched |
Tokenized stocks, natively
Because Cowl settles on Robinhood Chain, the tokenized stocks you trade — AAPLx, TSLAx, and the rest — are native assets, and every leg settles in USDG. A dollar peg that holds its value the whole way through the shield.
Buy inside, rather than deposit in
Value can only enter the pool through a deposit, so a deposit is the one thing a watcher can read. A token bought inside the pool never crosses that boundary at all — it comes into existence as a shielded note with no arrival to point at. Shield the native asset, then buy the rest through the adapter, and there is nothing to correlate.
Related
- MEV & anti copy-trade — why an unreadable order cannot be attacked.
- Shielded pool — the notes and proofs underneath.
- Denominations — why boundary amounts travel in shared sizes.
- Make a private trade — the walkthrough, both surfaces.