Avail has introduced ShieldTX for participants on Hyperliquid, enabling every perpetual futures trade to be executed via a distinct wallet.
Copy-trading bots monitor publicly visible Hyperliquid wallets and replicate trades within seconds, which can result in worse execution prices for the primary traders. ShieldTX makes it more difficult for bots to connect one position to another.
In an assessment shared exclusively with The Block prior to the rollout, ShieldTX analyzed 332,317 wallets that executed trades on Hyperliquid across a 30-day window. ShieldTX randomly chose seven traders from the top 100 on the platform, then reviewed 25 wallets that appeared to track each of them. It flagged potential copycats that matched a trader’s asset and long or short direction within 60 seconds at least 10 times during the 30-day span.
ShieldTX calculated the variance between the fill prices of the copycats and the traders they tracked, as stated to The Block by Anurag Arjun, the Polygon co-founder who headed Avail following its spin-out from Polygon in 2023. ShieldTX contrasted price movements during transactions that drew copy-traders with those that did not, controlling for asset, size, and volatility, and estimated the median extra execution expense for the copied traders at 63 basis points per transaction.
Among the top 150 accounts on the Hyperliquid leaderboard, 29% employ subaccounts, based on the findings from ShieldTX. Traders can execute orders from separate wallets through these accounts, yet the wallets remain transparently tied onchain, the report noted.
"We believed we maintained adequate privacy by rotating wallets," remarked the leader of an undisclosed digital-asset fund utilizing ShieldTX in a statement. "We had no concept that the wallets had already been associated with us and were actively being copied."
Using this identical evaluation, ShieldTX also provides a scanner enabling traders to identify which wallets might be mimicking them. Avail noted that publicly identifiable wallets can also expose a fund’s hedging activities or disclose novel trading tactics to rivals.
Separate wallets for each position
ShieldTX preserves deposited capital in a vault smart contract on Arbitrum. When a trader initiates a position, the tool generates a brand-new Hyperliquid wallet and executes the trade through it. Avail stated that alternative third-party shielding tools usually rely on a single wallet per trader, keeping their transactions and profits or losses public. Conversely, ShieldTX supplies traders with a fresh wallet for every single position while maintaining everything beneath one account. The positions themselves remain visible on Hyperliquid, but lack a direct onchain link back to the trader’s initial wallet.
Once a position wraps up, the returns flow back into the user’s shielded balance. Traders can pull out the funds or redeploy them, while retaining full access to their trading logs for audits and compliance purposes. Arjun mentioned that Avail has performed several internal evaluations for ShieldTX alongside external security firms, with a comprehensive audit currently underway.
Avail has been evaluating ShieldTX alongside a select cohort of Hyperliquid whales, trading desks, and funds since July, and is now rolling out broader access via an invite-code structure, offering fee reductions to AVAIL (AVAIL) stakers. That closed beta involved 75 traders, generated roughly $50 million in trading volume, and established more than 3,800 wallets, according to Arjun.
Beta participants successfully sidestepped copy-trading bots by utilizing the tool, Arjun stated, though he withheld a direct contrast of their execution costs prior to and following the rollout.
ShieldTX is aimed at wallets trading $500,000 or greater, alongside applications leveraging Hyperliquid builder codes, and operates on Nightshade, which is Avail’s zero-knowledge privacy framework.
"We created Nightshade because privacy serves as core infrastructure for onchain markets," Arjun declared in the announcement. "We engineered ShieldTX for Hyperliquid because participants there experience constrained privacy, and that deficiency is exploited by onchain surveillance tools, directly burdening traders with costs."
Avail has engaged with traders and developers throughout the Hyperliquid ecosystem and distributed details regarding ShieldTX via ecosystem connections, though Hyperliquid’s core contributors were not directly involved in its creation, Arjun confirmed.
Alternative derivatives trading venues have lately rolled out privacy capabilities, such as Hyperliquid competitor Aster, which introduced a privacy-focused blockchain for its derivatives network this past March. StarkWare likewise unveiled OffMarket earlier this month, enabling Polymarket participants to trade without publicly tying their positions to pre-existing accounts.
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/defi/2026-10-28-avail-launches-shieldtx-privacy-tool-targeting-copy-trading-bots-on-hyperliquid-431977.
