Avail launches ShieldTX, a wallet-per-position privacy tool for Hyperliquid perps

Avail opened broader access to ShieldTX on October 28, 2026 — a privacy tool for Hyperliquid perpetuals traders that opens each position from a fresh wallet, breaking the on-chain link that copy-trading bots scrape from the order book. The product had run in private beta since July. The Block has the launch write-up (theblock.co); Avail's engineering post is on the project blog (blog.availproject.org/why-we-built-shieldtx).

How it works

Each trade routes through a disposable Hyperliquid wallet tied back to one shielded account:

• A trader deposits USDC into a vault contract on Arbitrum.
• Avail's Nightshade zero-knowledge layer provisions a new Hyperliquid wallet for each new position.
• The position is placed on Hyperliquid's native order book — publicly visible there, but not linked to the trader's prior addresses.
• When the position closes, proceeds return to the shielded balance for withdrawal or re-use.

Avail says a scanner is available alongside the tool so traders can check which addresses may already be copying them. The core Hyperliquid team was not directly involved in building ShieldTX, per the project.

The numbers Avail published

• 332,317 wallets observed over a 30-day study window.
• 63 bps median added execution cost for traders who were being copied, as measured against uncopied baseline.
• 29% of the top 150 Hyperliquid leaderboard accounts use subaccounts, which Avail notes stay on-chain-linked.
• Private beta: 75 traders, ~$50M of volume, over 3,800 wallets provisioned.

Access is gated to wallets trading $500,000+ per position or apps using Hyperliquid builder codes. AVAIL stakers receive fee discounts; the specific schedule isn't published.

What to watch

1. Builder-code integrations. Any Hyperliquid front-end integrating ShieldTX via a builder code — the only non-trader distribution path Avail named at launch.
2. A separate landing page named ShadowFi on availproject.org is listed as "Coming Soon" with up to 10× leverage on BTC, ETH, SOL and HYPE perps. Whether that's a repackaging of ShieldTX or a successor product has not been clarified.
3. Omni (Variational) is pursuing the same wedge from a different angle — a privacy-first competitor to Hyperliquid rather than a privacy wrapper on top. Both bets are placed against Hyperliquid's full-transparency default.

Context

Hyperliquid's selling point — every order and every leaderboard public — is also the attack surface. Copy-trading bots feed off that transparency, and large wallets have been complaining for months that profitable setups get front-run before fills complete. ShieldTX's design (fresh wallet per position, state kept client-side under an invite code) sidesteps the issue without asking Hyperliquid to change anything. The product is led by Anurag Arjun, a Polygon co-founder; Avail spun out of Polygon in 2023.