Hi all. Our team has been building this quietly for a while and it opens to beta this week, so I want to introduce it here and take criticism from people who will actually give us feedback and find the holes.
What it is
Ballast is a desktop app that funds a Hyperliquid perps account directly from shielded ZEC, trades it behind a fresh single-use identity over Tor, and sends the proceeds back out to a shielded address. Self-custody, no KYC, no account, and every network request goes through an embedded Tor client.
Why someone here might care
Two reasons.
The first is trading perps privately. Every centralized venue path to Hyperliquid wants your ID before it will take your money, and the on-chain ones want an address already tied to everything else you have ever done. Here you get leverage, the full Hyperliquid market list, and a proper trading terminal, with none of it tracked back to you.
The second is hedging. You hold ZEC, you think it is going to drop, and you do not want to sell. Selling means an exchange, an ID check, a permanent record that you held this much on this date, or giving up the position entirely when all you wanted was to take some risk off the table for a little while.
A short perp against a slice of your bag does that instead. You choose how much to cover, so you can hedge a third and stay long the rest, or hedge the whole bag and effectively hold your own delta-neutral privacy stablecoin. If the price falls, the short pays for the fall on the part you covered, structurally stable by design. If you were wrong, it closes at whatever price you set. Ballast sizes it against what the wallet actually holds and opens it in one click.
How the ZEC rail works, and where it is not perfect
ZEC leaves the shielded pool, makes one transparent hop, and crosses to Hyperliquid over HyperUnit. Unit’s deposit addresses are guardian-verified and the app verifies them itself rather than trusting what it is handed.
That transparent hop is real and I am not going to pretend it away. An observer of the Zcash chain sees an amount leave the Ironwood pool to a t-address belonging to a bridge. What they do not see is which Hyperliquid identity it becomes: the trading identity is fresh, used once, and everything past the hop is over Tor. Coming home runs in reverse and ends shielded.
Times and costs: roughly two hours from your self-custody ZCash wallet into Hyperliquid on the bridge’s 100-confirmation requirement, roughly thirty minutes home. Flat Unit bridge fee of about 0.0057 ZEC, and a minimum 0.10 ZEC entry floor into Hyperliquid because Unit has its own minimum. Ballast takes 0.05% as a Hyperliquid builder fee on perp trades.
Honest limits
Not audited by a third party yet. We are in discussion with firms and intend to apply to Zcash Community Grants for exactly that. The source will be available for anyone to read.
It is not a dark pool. Hyperliquid is transparent and anyone can watch the identity you are trading with. What they cannot do is link it to your other identities, wallets, or to you, and every cycle gets a new Hyperliquid account.
There is a ZEC and Monero route over THORChain as well, built but unusable right now because the THORChain functionality it depends on is halted. I mention it because I would rather you hear it from me than find a greyed-out button and wonder why it isn’t working. ZEC will be able to take that rail once it is live. It is faster, cheaper, and it settles across THORChain’s validator set rather than a small guardian federation (hyperunit’s bridge).
License and source
Source-available under the Ballast Source License, derived from FSL 1.1 with the non-compete clause removed. The only restriction is that you cannot strip or redirect the builder fee. Everything else, commercial use and forks included, is permitted, and each release converts to Apache 2.0 two years after it ships.
Website: https://hyperballast.xyz/
Source Code: Ballast · source (Now Live)
Linux is the first-class target and ships as an AppImage, Windows second, macOS and Android planned.
What we are hoping for from this forum
Tear into the rail design, particularly that transparent hop, and tell me if there is a shape of it I have not considered that keeps more of the shielded property.
We would also like to know whether privacy perps is something people are interested in, and whether the hedge framing (delta-neutral privacy stablecoin) is actually useful to people who hold ZEC.
We appreciate any feedback or criticisms. Thanks!
