View keys & selective disclosure
Hide from the crowd, not from the law. Cowl is built so you can prove what you owe, to exactly who you owe it, and to no one else.
View keys
A view key is a read-only credential you generate from your account. Whoever holds it can seethe shielded activity in its scope — positions, transfers, realized P&L — but can never spend, move, or trade. Handing over a view key is disclosure, not a transfer of control.
cowl viewkey show # print your public view key
cowl viewkey new # generate a new oneThe private half stays in ~/.cowl/viewkey.json, mode 0600. It is a separate key from the one that spends, which is what makes read-only mean read-only rather than a promise.
Selective disclosure
Scoped disclosure is what Era 02 builds on top of this, so an auditor sees a window rather than your whole life. The scopes it covers:
| Scope by | Example |
|---|---|
| Time range | One quarter, for a tax review |
| Asset | One position, for a counterparty who only needs that |
| Counterparty or flow | What moved between you and one address, and nothing else |
Time-boxing and revocation land with it. Read-only is already true today; the scoping is the part being built.
What you can prove
- Positions & holdings — solvency or exposure at a point in time.
- Realized P&L — a clean figure for a tax authority, for one period.
- Source of funds — which deposit funded a position, matched against the public record of it entering the pool.
Why disclosure, not gatekeeping
Entering the pool is permissionless: no account, no allowlist, nobody’s approval. The compliance story runs the other way round, and it is the stronger one. Every crossing of the boundary is on the public ledger, and what happens inside is disclosable by you, to whoever is owed an answer, with a key that can only read. You answer for your own activity instead of asking a gatekeeper to vouch for it.