Cleanup Flows

Cleanup flows are comprehensive maintenance operations that keep your Tuck wallet organized, efficient, and private. As you use the wallet, shard wallets and temporary wallets accumulate. Cleanup flows consolidate these wallets, shield scattered ETH back to your private balance, and remove unused wallets, ensuring optimal privacy and performance over time.

Why Cleanup Flows Are Needed

Robinhood Chain does not charge rent, so an idle wallet costs you nothing to leave open. The cost of accumulation is not storage — it's gas and anonymity.

Every additional shard means another transaction whenever an operation has to gather funds from across your wallets, and each of those transactions carries both L2 execution gas and its share of the Ethereum blob data cost. More importantly, many shards holding small, distinctive balances create patterns. A scattered set of dust positions is easier to fingerprint and correlate than a small number of clean ones, which shrinks your effective anonymity set.

Cleanup flows solve both problems by consolidating wallets, recovering scattered ETH, and removing unused addresses. Regular cleanup also rotates old shards to refresh your privacy set — similar to defragmenting a disk: it doesn't change what you have, but it organizes everything for better performance and privacy.

When to Run Cleanup Flows

Tuck prompts you to run cleanup when your wallet needs maintenance — typically after accumulating many shard wallets (from swaps, receives, or airdrops), when ETH is scattered across multiple wallets, or when operation costs start creeping up. You can also trigger cleanup manually from the wallet interface. Cleanup is not urgent and can be delayed, but running it periodically keeps operations fast and cheap as wallet counts grow.

What Are Cleanup Flows?

A cleanup flow is a unified workflow that combines three maintenance operations into a single coordinated process:

1. Consolidation — merges tokens from multiple shard wallets into fewer shards, reducing the total number of active accounts
2. Shield All ETH — gathers and shields scattered ETH from various wallets back to your private balance
3. Temp Wallet Cleanup — removes unused temporary wallets (expire after 1 day, then permanently deleted from trash after 7 more days)

These operations run sequentially as subflows within the main cleanup flow. Each subflow can be skipped if not needed. The cleanup flow progresses through stages: CONSOLIDATING → SHIELDING_ETH → CLEANING_TEMP_WALLETS → COMPLETED (or FAILED). Each subflow has its own status (PENDING, IN_PROGRESS, COMPLETED, FAILED, or SKIPPED) that you can monitor in the transaction history. If a subflow fails, the cleanup flow may continue with the remaining operations or mark the entire flow as failed, depending on the severity of the error.

Note: cleanup flows are blocking operations that prevent other operations from running while active. See Wallet Management — Blocking Operations for details on what gets blocked and how blocking works.

Conditions to Shield All ETH

The Shield All ETH subflow gathers ETH from various sources (public shards, private shards, temporary wallets, bridge temp wallets, and the main wallet) and shields it back to your private balance. It only processes wallets where doing so is actually worth the gas.

A wallet must hold at least 0.00003 ETH to be eligible. Shield All ETH aggregates ETH from eligible wallets into temporary aggregator shards — public and private sources are aggregated separately to maintain privacy boundaries — then shields the aggregated amounts. For each source wallet, if the balance exceeds the threshold, it transfers the ETH (minus gas) to an aggregator shard. Because there is no minimum-balance requirement on Robinhood Chain, source wallets can be swept completely empty.

If an aggregator shard doesn't accumulate enough ETH to exceed the shielding reserve (0.0001 ETH), the shielding operation is skipped to avoid spending more on proof verification gas than you'd recover.

Fees for Cleanup

Cleanup flows involve multiple transactions, each of which costs gas. Before running a cleanup flow, Tuck calculates and displays estimated costs so you know what to expect. Fees include:

• Robinhood Chain gas — L2 execution plus the amortized Ethereum blob data cost for each on-chain operation
• Shielding gas — 0.0001 ETH reserved per shield operation (covers Groth16 proof verification and the Merkle insert)
• Relayer reimbursement — Tuck Shield withdrawal fee for reimbursing transaction costs

Consolidation cost depends on how many shard wallets need to be merged — each token transfer is one transaction, roughly 0.000006 ETH. There is no per-token account creation cost, so consolidating many token types is much cheaper here than on account-model chains. All consolidation gas is paid by the Tuck relayer and reimbursed from your shielded balance. Public and private shard consolidations are handled separately to maintain privacy boundaries.

Shield All ETH cost depends on how many wallets have eligible ETH and how many shielding operations are needed. The total can be 0 ETH (no eligible wallets), 0.0001 ETH (only public or only private ETH), or 0.0002 ETH (both). Temp wallet cleanup has minimal cost since it only involves balance checks and deleting local wallet data.

Actual costs may vary (±10-20%) as Ethereum blob prices move — that component is set by L1 demand, not by Robinhood Chain. The cost estimate helps you decide whether cleanup is worth running: if you have very little scattered ETH or few shards to consolidate, the fees might exceed the benefit.

Best Practices

Run consolidation when you have accumulated many shards or when operation costs start feeling high. You don't need to consolidate frequently — periodic cleanup is usually sufficient for typical usage.

Execute Shield All ETH after consolidation to capture any ETH left in shards that were deleted. This ensures you're getting back all the value from those wallets before they're removed.

Keep some buffer in your shielded balance to cover cleanup costs. If your shielded balance is very low, you may not be able to run cleanup until you shield more ETH. Aim to keep some ETH shielded as a maintenance buffer.

Don't run cleanup right before making important transactions. These operations take time and tie up your wallet. Run cleanup when you have a few minutes and aren't in a hurry to send or swap.

Troubleshooting Cleanup Issues

If consolidation fails partway through, check your shielded balance. Insufficient balance for relayer reimbursement is the most common cause of failure. The relayer pays gas upfront but requires reimbursement from your shielded ETH. If you're running low, shield more ETH before retrying.

Sequencer congestion or an RPC hiccup can cause a workflow to time out. Robinhood Chain produces blocks roughly every 100ms, so genuine congestion is rare — repeated failures more often point to a rate-limited public RPC endpoint than to the chain itself. Retrying usually resolves it.

If a workflow seems stuck, you can safely close the wallet and come back later. Tuck tracks all operation states and resumes from the last completed step. Nothing is lost when you interrupt a workflow — it picks up where it left off next time.