HOOZ.

Abstract

Zcash is the one widely traded asset whose history can stay private. Robinhood Chain hosts tokenised equities and the Pons launcher, and it is as transparent as any Ethereum rollup. Until now no road connected them that kept the Zcash side private and the Robinhood side free of custody. HOOZ is that road. It chains NEAR Intents, a settlement network that already runs, to one small contract on Robinhood Chain, the Sorter, which turns incoming ETH into $WHOZ for a beneficiary chosen in advance. HOOZ defends one sentence: nothing on Robinhood Chain links the address that receives $WHOZ to the ZEC that paid for it. This paper sets out what that sentence rests on, the trusted surface, the token that funds the road, and the questions the design leaves open.

1. The problem

Every EVM chain publishes who paid whom. Auditors love that property. A trader whose treasury people watch, a builder whose wallet everyone knows, or anyone who wants a purchase without a permanent record pays for it.

Privacy tools written inside EVM chains share two weaknesses. Their anonymity sets stay small, so the exit often becomes the most traceable transaction on the chain. And regulators follow any protocol that touches them.

Zcash avoids both. Its shielded pool is large, ten years old, and private at the base layer rather than inside a contract. What Zcash lacks is a way into the places where things happen on EVM chains.

Selling ZEC on an exchange and withdrawing ETH hands the exchange a complete record. A cross-chain swap into an EVM address works, and buying from that address works too. The gap is a product that turns those two steps into one, stays non-custodial, and states which step trusts whom.

2. The road

An envelope's delivery passes four stations. HOOZ wrote only the last.

The shielded wallet. You hold ZEC in the shielded pool. You give HOOZ three values: an amount, a Robinhood Chain address that should receive the delivery, and a transparent Zcash address for refunds.

NEAR Intents. HOOZ asks the 1Click API for a quote: ZEC in, ETH on Robinhood Chain out. The answer carries a fresh transparent deposit address and a deadline. You send ZEC there from your shielded balance. On Zcash this is a deshield: an amount arrives at a transparent address, and nothing names the sender. Solvers fill the intent in about seven and a half minutes.

The envelope. Before $WHOZ exists, NEAR Intents pays your address and the road ends there, with ETH. After launch, NEAR Intents pays your envelope instead: a contract address on Robinhood Chain derived from your address alone. It exists as a destination before any code sits at it.

The Sorter. Anyone calls sweep(beneficiary). The Sorter deploys the envelope if it has no code, pulls its ETH, keeps 0.5 % for the treasury, buys $WHOZ on the Pons curve and transfers the tokens to you. The envelope is empty again and ready for next time.

On a good day the road takes eight minutes. You did one thing: sent ZEC from a shielded balance.

When no solver quotes Robinhood Chain directly, a fallback exists. NEAR Intents pays ETH on Arbitrum One to the courier, and the courier sends one Relay deposit to your envelope. Section 4 covers the trust this adds.

3. The privacy claim, precisely

Walk the road backward from the holder and record what each observer can establish.

An observer of Robinhood Chain sees the holder receive $WHOZ from a sweep that drained an envelope, and sees that envelope funded by a NEAR Intents solver. On the NEAR Intents explorer they find the swap: so much ZEC, deposited at a transparent address at a given time, paid out as so much ETH. On Zcash they find the deshield that funded that deposit address.

There the walk stops. The deshield has no visible sender. The shielded pool's proofs keep the ZEC that left it apart from any ZEC that went in, any address, any earlier transaction.

So the claim is exact: the road is fully traceable from the holder back to a deshield, and not traceable from that deshield to a person.

The claim leaves three things out.

It says nothing about later behaviour. What the holder does after delivery is public in the ordinary way.

It does not hide amounts or timing. Deshield exactly one ZEC every Monday morning, and anyone can match your deliveries without HOOZ.

It does not blind the courier on the fallback road. The courier learns which deposit address paid which envelope, which an Arbitrum observer already knows, plus the refund address. Hence the advice to use a fresh refund address.

4. The trusted surface

On the direct road before launch, HOOZ holds nothing and signs nothing. The site asks for a quote; the solver pays you.

On the direct road after launch, the solver pays your envelope, and the Sorter's rules govern what happens next. Two facts hold whatever the owner does. The Sorter never holds user tokens across transactions. And you can always call withdraw to take the raw ETH out of your envelope, whether the Sorter is paused, the market changed, or the token exists at all. No function stops it.

On the fallback road the courier holds one order's ETH on Arbitrum One for the seconds between settlement and the Relay deposit. The amount is one order and every transaction is public. A courier that stole would get caught by the first person reading the Ledger.

An optional instant path lets the courier call deliver from a treasury-funded vault the moment an Arbitrum settlement lands. Here you trust the courier to deliver only against real settlements. The contract bounds that trust: one delivery per order id, 0.5 ETH per order, 5 ETH per UTC day, and the vault holds treasury capital only.

5. The Sorter and the envelopes

The Sorter is one contract of a few hundred lines, with no inherited frameworks, deployed once on Robinhood Chain. It holds the fee, the caps, the token address and a market adapter that knows how to buy on Pons: on the bonding curve first, then on the Uniswap V4 pool after graduation, including the gap where the curve is full and the pool does not exist yet.

An envelope is a twenty-line contract the Sorter deploys with CREATE2, salted with your address. Anyone can compute it, and it accepts payment before deployment. It has a receive function and one drain function only the Sorter can call. No owner, no upgrade.

The consequence worth stating: HOOZ need not be the only thing that pays an envelope. NEAR Intents pays it. Relay can pay it. A friend can pay it. The Sorter does not ask where the ETH came from.

6. The token

$WHOZ launches on Pons V2, Robinhood Chain's token launcher, as a plain bonding-curve token: one billion units, all on the curve, a 2 % creator tax to the treasury. No team allocation, no vesting schedule. The launch buy, whatever its size, shows in the launch transaction.

The token is what an envelope buys, and its fees fund the road. Two streams reach the treasury: the creator tax on every trade and the 0.5 % Sorter fee on every envelope. The treasury spends them on courier gas on two chains, the courier's machine and the vault that enables instant deliveries.

The economy stays small on purpose. It pays for itself at modest volume and needs no rising price to work. Whether the treasury should buy $WHOZ with any surplus is a question for the community that forms around it. This paper promises no buyback.

7. Open questions

Stocks. Robinhood Chain exists for tokenised equities, and the market adapter could buy a share token as easily as $WHOZ. Whether anyone should ship shielded ZEC into listed equities is a regulatory question. Version one answers it by not shipping it.

Aggregation. Each sweep trades alone on the curve. Batching would cut price impact and blur timing, and it would also make the Sorter hold several users' ETH at once, which the current design avoids on purpose.

Amount privacy. Nothing here hides amounts. Any user can deshield a round amount to their own transparent address first and split it afterwards. That practice lives outside HOOZ.

8. Guarantees

• The Zcash side is as private as the shielded pool: a deshield reveals amount, destination and time.
• Before launch HOOZ holds nothing at any point.
• After launch, ETH in an envelope moves only into a purchase for you or back to you.
• The fallback road trusts the courier with one order for seconds; the instant path trusts it within fixed caps.
• The ABI caps the fee at 2 %; it ships at 0.5 %.
• Every number on the site comes from a rail or the chain.

HOOZ is a short road. Its value is that it stays short, that every station is either someone else's tested product or a contract you can read in ten minutes, and that it tells you where the trust sits.

HOOZ is software. It is not an exchange, a custodian or an adviser. Read the security page before you rely on it.