Getting started

Quickstart

Get from a public wallet to a shielded position in five steps. Everything below runs on Robinhood Chain and settles in USDG.

Before you start

A wallet connected to Robinhood Chain.
Some USDG on that wallet (bridge in, or swap on-chain).
The Cowl app open at your dashboard.

No gas token needed

You never hold the chain’s gas token. Once you have shielded funds, the gasless relayer pays gas and takes a small fee out of your shielded balance.

1 — Shield your funds

Deposit USDG into the shielded pool. Your deposit is received on a fresh stealth address and recorded as a private note. This is the boundary between the public world and your shielded state.

cowl shield --asset USDG --amount 5000

2 — Trade privately

Buy or sell tokenized stocks entirely inside the shield. Your size, timing, and direction stay off the public tape — nothing for a bot to front-run or a wallet-watcher to mirror.

cowl trade --buy AAPLx --size 1200 --shielded

3 — Hold, unseen

Your shielded portfolio aggregates privately. Balances and cost basis are yours to read with your keys; the block explorer only ever sees commitments.

4 — Disclose on your terms

When an auditor, tax authority, or counterparty needs proof, issue a read-only view key scoped to exactly what they are owed.

cowl disclose --view-key --scope 2026-Q1 --to auditor.eth

5 — Unshield when you exit

Move value back out to a public address with unshield. Mind the boundary — see good hygiene at the edge so the exit does not undo your privacy.

cowl unshield --asset USDG --amount 5000 --to 0x…

Tip

Prefer the terminal? Install the CLI (npm i -g @cowlprotocol/cli) — anything you can do in the app, you can script.