Avail has launched ShieldTX, a privacy-focused execution layer that opens each perpetual futures position on Hyperliquid through its own separate wallet. The goal is to break the on-chain trail that copy-trading bots use to shadow successful traders, according to a report by CryptoBriefing published Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026.

On Hyperliquid, every trade is public. That is the point of a fully on-chain exchange — and, for the platform's most successful traders, also the problem.

How ShieldTX Works

The setup starts with a deposit. Traders place USDC into a vault on Arbitrum, which becomes a shielded balance. From there, ShieldTX spins up new Hyperliquid accounts on demand, and each position draws funding from the shielded balance through one of these fresh, unlinkable wallets.

The result is that the direct on-chain connection between a trader's funding wallet and their individual positions disappears. An observer can still see a position appear on the order book, but tracing it back to the capital behind it becomes much harder.

Importantly, the trades themselves still execute natively on Hyperliquid's order book. ShieldTX hides who is trading, not the trading itself, so positions still hit the same liquidity as everyone else's. In effect, the tool splits the difference: execution remains on the public order book, while the link between a position and the person funding it is obscured.

Under the hood, the tool runs on Avail's Nightshade zkAppchain, a zero-knowledge application-specific chain that uses what Avail describes as a “commit-first, prove-later” architecture, with settlement on Arbitrum. In practical terms, the system records actions first and produces cryptographic proofs that they were valid afterward. Zero-knowledge proofs allow a system to confirm something is correct without revealing the underlying details — precisely the property a privacy tool requires.

The Copy-Trading Problem

Hyperliquid's appeal rests on transparency. The exchange runs a fully on-chain central limit order book for perpetual futures, which means wallet activity is visible to anyone who looks. Bots have been looking.

Copy-trading bots monitor publicly visible Hyperliquid wallets, spot positions opened by traders with good track records, and open similar trades within seconds.

For the trader being copied, this is not flattering imitation. When a crowd of bots piles into the same direction right behind a position, the market can move before that trader finishes building or unwinding it, potentially leaving them with worse execution prices.

The situation is an odd one for serious traders. In traditional finance, a fund's live positions are closely guarded. On a transparent on-chain exchange, they are visible to anyone with a block explorer and a script.

ShieldTX's answer is to make positions hard to stitch together. If every trade comes from a new wallet, a bot cannot easily tell that the position it just saw belongs to the same trader who nailed the last five.

Markets, Leverage and Fees

ShieldTX supports all Hyperliquid perpetual markets, with leverage of up to 40x.

Pricing comes in layers. Traders pay 5 basis points of notional value, plus $1 to open a position and roughly $2 for closes sent to external wallets. A basis point is one hundredth of a percent, so 5 basis points works out to 0.05% of position size. On a large trade, that fee is the meaningful number; the fixed charges matter more for smaller positions.

Avail is pitching the cost as a net saving. Early analyses from the Avail team suggest traders may save up to 25 basis points per transaction by reducing the impact of copy-trading bots. If that estimate holds, the math looks attractive: pay 5 basis points to potentially avoid up to 25. The figure is Avail's own, however, and actual results will depend on how much a given trader is being followed in the first place.

Traders whom nobody is copying have little front-running to escape. For them, ShieldTX is mostly an added cost with a privacy benefit attached.

Early Traction

ShieldTX has processed over $2.5 million in trading volume during its private beta. That is a modest figure next to Hyperliquid's broader activity, but it is a starting point for a product aimed at a specific audience.

Avail is targeting professional traders and institutions — the groups most likely to have strategies worth copying and positions large enough to suffer from slippage.

There are open questions worth watching. The first is whether bots adapt: sophisticated operators may look for other signals, such as timing patterns or deposit behavior, to try to reconnect the dots. The second is adoption. A shielded pool generally works better the more people use it, because a larger crowd makes any single participant harder to pick out — and a beta volume of $2.5 million suggests the crowd is still small. The third is cost discipline. The fixed fees and the 5-basis-point charge add up for active traders, so the product's value proposition rests heavily on whether the savings Avail projects show up in real execution data.

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Disclosure: The original CryptoBriefing article was edited by Kaye Quema.

Source: CryptoBriefing