Avail Launches ShieldTX for Hyperliquid, Targeting Copy-Trading Bots

Privacy has become an increasingly important concern for active on-chain traders. On transparent blockchains, every wallet interaction can reveal more than a trader may intend—from entry and exit timing to position size, risk appetite, and recurring execution patterns.

Avail has introduced ShieldTX, a privacy-focused tool designed for traders operating on Hyperliquid. Its primary objective is to make it more difficult for automated copy-trading systems to connect a trader’s transactions and reproduce their strategy.

Why Copy-Trading Is a Challenge on Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid has grown into one of the most widely used decentralized perpetuals trading platforms. Its transparent settlement environment allows users and third parties to monitor activity, analyze wallet behavior, and build trading dashboards or automated strategies.

This transparency can be useful. Traders can review market activity, evaluate execution data, and study the behavior of high-performing accounts. However, the same visibility can create an unfavorable environment for professional traders.

When a wallet consistently opens or closes positions, automated bots can attempt to identify the account and mirror its actions. Even if the copied trade is executed only seconds later, the additional market pressure and reduced execution quality can affect the original trader.

The issue is not limited to direct imitation. A wallet’s historical activity may also reveal:

• Preferred trading pairs
• Typical position sizes
• Entry and exit timing
• Leverage preferences
• Risk management patterns
• Reactions to market volatility

For traders whose performance depends on speed or differentiated execution, these signals can become a measurable disadvantage.

How ShieldTX Uses Separate Wallets

ShieldTX takes a wallet-separation approach. Instead of routing multiple perpetual positions through one publicly identifiable address, the tool creates an independent wallet for each position.

This architecture is designed to reduce the ability of monitoring systems to connect all of a trader’s activity to a single address. A bot may still observe an individual transaction, but identifying the broader relationship between multiple trades becomes more difficult when those trades originate from separate wallets.

The concept is similar to reducing metadata exposure in other areas of digital security. Separating activity does not make transactions invisible, but it can limit the amount of information that can be connected through a single public identity.

For traders, the potential benefits include:

1. Less obvious wallet clustering
   Multiple positions may no longer appear to originate from one consistently recognizable address.

2. More difficulty for automated strategy mapping
   Bots may have fewer reliable signals for determining which transactions belong to the same trader.

3. Reduced exposure of trading habits
   Position-level separation can make it harder to build a complete profile of a trader’s behavior.

4. Greater control over operational privacy
   Traders can treat each position as a separate execution environment rather than exposing their entire activity history through one wallet.

According to research cited in coverage from The Block, the analysis behind ShieldTX examined more than 332,000 Hyperliquid trading wallets. Researchers also reviewed seven traders among the platform’s top 100 accounts, together with wallets suspected of following their activity.

The study estimated that traders being copied experienced a median additional cost of approximately 63 basis points per trade, or 0.63%, due to changes in execution prices. While the impact will vary by market conditions, position size, liquidity, and trading frequency, the figure illustrates why copy-trading is more than a theoretical concern.

Subaccounts Do Not Fully Solve Wallet Linkability

Hyperliquid supports subaccounts, which allow users to organize trading activity across different account structures. This can be useful for separating strategies, managing risk, or allocating capital.

However, account separation does not automatically guarantee privacy. If the related wallets can still be connected through funding activity, transaction timing, repeated behavior, or other on-chain clues, an observer may reconstruct the relationship between them.

Research referenced in the same coverage found that approximately 29% of the top 150 Hyperliquid accounts used subaccounts. Yet subaccounts may remain linkable on-chain, particularly when they are funded or managed through patterns that reveal a common origin.

This distinction is important:

• Account separation helps organize activity.
• Wallet separation can reduce direct address reuse.
• Transaction privacy depends on whether surrounding activity can still be correlated.

No single technique eliminates all forms of blockchain analysis. Even with different wallets, observers may use timing, asset flows, gas behavior, trade size, and market reactions to infer relationships between transactions.

Privacy Does Not Mean Complete Anonymity

ShieldTX should be viewed as a privacy-enhancing layer rather than an anonymity guarantee.

Public blockchains are designed to provide verifiable transaction histories. Wallet-level privacy tools can reduce the clarity of those records, but they cannot necessarily conceal every operational signal. For example, a trader may still expose connections through:

• Deposits from a known funding address
• Repeated transfer schedules
• Identical trading behavior across wallets
• Shared withdrawal destinations
• Similar transaction timing
• Publicly disclosed wallet addresses

Traders should also evaluate the security model of any tool that creates or manages additional wallets. More wallets may improve privacy, but they can also increase the complexity of key management, recovery, transaction review, and fund monitoring.

Before using a privacy-focused trading workflow, users should understand who controls the keys, how wallet recovery works, whether transactions are signed locally, and what permissions are required. Hyperliquid users can consult the platform’s official documentation to better understand account structures and trading operations.

What ShieldTX Signals for DeFi Trading

The launch reflects a broader shift in decentralized finance. As on-chain markets become more competitive, transaction transparency is increasingly being treated as a source of information leakage.

For retail users, public trading data can provide useful market intelligence. For professional traders, the same data may expose proprietary execution patterns. This creates demand for tools that preserve the auditability of blockchain settlement while limiting unnecessary behavioral disclosure.

The development of ShieldTX also highlights an ongoing design challenge for decentralized exchanges: how to maintain transparent settlement without making every participant’s strategy equally easy to monitor and reproduce.

Future solutions may combine wallet-level separation with additional techniques such as delayed disclosures, private order flow, encrypted intents, or more advanced transaction-routing systems. Each approach will involve trade-offs among privacy, composability, liquidity, usability, and regulatory requirements.

Practical Security Considerations for Traders

Privacy tools should complement—not replace—basic wallet security practices. Traders should consider the following measures:

• Use strong, unique authentication for every trading-related account.
• Keep long-term funds separate from active trading capital.
• Review transaction details before signing.
• Track each operational wallet and its recovery method.
• Avoid unnecessary address reuse.
• Be cautious when connecting wallets to unfamiliar applications.
• Maintain a clear record of which wallet controls each position.
• Test new workflows with limited funds before expanding their use.

A hardware wallet such as OneKey can help protect private keys used for self-custody by keeping sensitive signing operations isolated from potentially exposed online environments. It does not make trading activity private by itself, and users should verify whether their intended trading workflow and signing setup are supported before transferring funds.

The Bigger Picture

Avail’s ShieldTX launch underscores a growing reality in crypto markets: transparency can improve verification, but it can also expose valuable trading intelligence.

By creating a separate wallet for each perpetual position, ShieldTX aims to make wallet clustering and automated copy-trading more difficult on Hyperliquid. The reported 63-basis-point median impact offers a concrete indication of how much execution costs can matter when a strategy is followed in a public and competitive market.

For traders, the key lesson is that privacy, security, and operational discipline are closely connected. Protecting a strategy requires more than hiding a wallet address—it requires careful management of transaction patterns, funding flows, private keys, and the tools used to interact with decentralized markets.