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Oarkel
Docs / Introduction

What is Oarkel?

Oarkel is a privacy protocol for Robinhood Chain: a shared pool where ETH and $OARKEL are held as private notes, and where private holders earn the protocol's fees.

On this page

The problem with a public ledger

Every account on Robinhood Chain is an open book. Paste an address into the explorer and you get its balance, every token it holds and every transfer it ever made. That openness is what lets strangers verify each other, but it also means that the moment one address is tied to a person, through an exchange withdrawal, an ENS name or a payment to a friend, their whole financial history comes with it.

Oarkel adds a private side to the same chain. Value moved into the Oarkel pool stops being a row anyone can read and becomes a note: an encrypted record that only its owner's keys can open. The contract still enforces every rule, but it does so by checking proofs instead of reading balances.

What sets Oarkel apart

  • Private by choice, not by chain. $OARKEL is planned as an ordinary ERC-20 that wallets, explorers and DEXs handle as usual. You opt into privacy by shrouding, and opt out by unshrouding.
  • Paid to stay private. Protocol fees are designed to flow into one vault owned by shrouded $OARKEL. Public holders receive none of it.
  • No operator. The pool contract has no owner, no admin function and no upgrade path, so nobody can freeze or move a note.
  • No gas wallet needed. A relayer can submit transactions for you and take its fee from the note.

What is live today

Be clear about this before anything else: the Oarkel contracts are written and tested, but not deployed. There is no contract to deposit into yet, and the $OARKEL contract address has not been published.

What works today on this site:

  • Connecting an EVM wallet, with Robinhood Chain added automatically.
  • Live chain readings: latest block, gas price and the Chainlink ETH/USD feed on Robinhood Chain.
  • The full app in practice mode: shroud, hold, send and unshroud with practice balances. Every action is a free wallet signature, no transaction is sent and no real value moves.
Any claim in these docs about immutability, the missing owner and admin function, or fees describes the contract code as written. It becomes a fact on chain once those contracts are deployed, their addresses are published on the deployments page and the code is verified on the explorer.

Where to read next

  • Core ideas: notes, commitments, nullifiers and proofs in plain words.
  • Vault and yield: how fees raise the value of private shares.
  • Team powers: what the team will and will not be able to do.
  • First steps: walk through the practice app in five minutes.