On August 29, the Hyperliquid ecosystem prediction market project Outcome officially announced that as the first permissionless HIP-4 Builder project, it had completed deployment on the Hyperliquid mainnet—To obtain this ticket, the Outcome team staked 500,000 HYPE tokens as collateral, valued at approximately $42 million at the time.
The landing of Outcome signifies that Hyperliquid has officially fired the first shot of HIP-4 permissionless deployment, marking the entry of Hyperliquid into the Builder era of the prediction market track.
In the context where head platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket have already captured a large number of users and market share, Hyperliquid obviously cannot come from behind by solely creating a few markets itself. The path it has chosen is to open up its expertise in on-chain trading, order books, collateral, and settlement infrastructure, handing over the work of finding users, operating products, and creating markets to third-party teams in the ecosystem.
This was also the path once taken by HIP-3. Today, custom markets created by third-party Builders have become an integral part of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with trade.xyz standing out as one of the most representative success stories.
Now, the same question is facing HIP-4—When Hyperliquid opens the stage of the prediction market to third-party players, who can be the first to find users, establish liquidity, and ultimately become the trade.xyz of the prediction market?
Aside from the already launched Outcome, teams such as Unit, Skew, and trade.xyz have also declared or started positioning themselves for HIP-4, kicking off a competition around the entrance, liquidity, and users of the Hyperliquid prediction market.
What Is HIP-4? (Skip if familiar)
In simple terms, HIP-4 is the "Outcome Markets" mechanism introduced by Hyperliquid, allowing users to trade around the outcome of a future event.
Using the simplest binary market as an example, users can trade on whether “something will happen”. If the final outcome is “yes”, the contract settles to 1; if the outcome is “no”, it settles to 0— the first batch of markets launched on the Hyperliquid mainnet was related to BTC price day trade binary contracts, where users could trade on whether BTC would be above a specific price at a certain time.
From a product perspective, this allows HIP-4 to naturally support a wide range of trading scenarios such as prediction markets and binary options. However, one of the biggest differences between it and platforms like Polymarket is that HIP-4 is not attempting to build a standalone prediction market. Instead, it is directly built on top of Hyperliquid's HyperCore trading infrastructure, sharing the underlying trading and settlement system with existing spot and perpetual contracts.
The key change in HIP-4 in the next phase is the permissionless deployment. In the future, validators will no longer need to individually approve each specific event market; they will first approve standardized templates, and third-party Builders can then create specific markets within these template frameworks and share fee revenue with Hyperliquid. As a cost of obtaining this permission, deployers will need to stake 500,000 HYPE tokens (same as HIP-3), lock them for 6 months, and take responsibility for the normal operation and settlement of the markets.
In other words, Hyperliquid's goal is not just to become the next Polymarket, but more like establishing a foundational trading infrastructure for prediction markets and allowing different teams to compete based on the same infrastructure.
HIP-3 has already proven that this model could nurture projects like Trade.xyz; now, with HIP-4, new Builders have also begun to enter the scene.
· Odaily Note: Refer to "HIP-4 Opens Permissionless Deployment, Can Hyperliquid Kill Polymarket?" for more details.
Outcome: Preemptive
As the first market to be deployed, Outcome is clearly the fastest-moving player in the HIP-4 ecosystem.
As early as May this year, Outcome publicly announced that it had independently raised 500,000 HYPE tokens; and following the open permissionless deployment of HIP-4, it quickly announced itself as the first team to deploy a market on the mainnet. According to the Outcome team, these 500,000 HYPE tokens served as a security deposit, providing over $42 million in economic guarantee for the integrity of its market.
From a product perspective, Outcome's current roadmap covers cryptocurrency, stocks, indexes, commodities, and sports events. Currently, 28 prediction events have been launched, with a total trading volume of $1.16 million within 2 days of launch. To seize early liquidity, Outcome has also launched a trading reward program totaling over $1 million.
In summary, Outcome's greatest advantage is its first-mover status—it no longer needs to explain to the market "what it is preparing to do," but has already taken the lead in the actual operational phase.
However, being the "first" does not always guarantee becoming the largest. The real challenge of the prediction market is not just deploying contracts but continually creating markets of trading value and addressing liquidity, user acquisition, and market distribution issues. What Outcome needs to demonstrate next is whether it can transform the "early bird" label into a true scale advantage.
Skew: The Second Project to Land
Following Outcome, another HIP-4 Builder project, Skew, has also completed the deployment of its first event contract on the Hyperliquid mainnet this morning.
Skew's greatest advantage is its partnership with the Nasdaq-listed company Hyperion DeFi, which will provide it with 500,000 HYPE tokens to meet the staking requirement. It is worth noting that the collaboration direction between Hyperion DeFi and Skew in July was HIP-3, aimed at building a perpetual contract market for institutional clients, but quickly shifted to HIP-4 in August.
According to Skew's official social media disclosure, the project had previously opened testnet qualification registration, and as of August 6th, over 40,000 individual users had applied for Skew's testnet qualification.
While these 40,000 testnet sign-up users do not entirely represent the final active users, the actual conversion rate remains to be observed, indicating that Skew has already accumulated some potential demand before the official product launch.
trade.xyz: The Former Champion, Set to Exit
trade.xyz is the most unique entity in this competition. While the question posed in this article is "Who will become the new trade.xyz," interestingly, trade.xyz's development team, Unit Labs, has also been considered by the market as a potential participant in HIP-4.
Community monitoring has found that Unit Labs first significantly increased its HYPE holdings, then later adjusted its HYPE staking structure at a sensitive integer scale of “500,000 tokens”:
· Initially, they deployed the trade.xyz HIP-3 address to withdraw 500,000 HYPE tokens from the Infinitefield validator and staked them to the Hyperliquid Strategies × Unit validator.
· Subsequently, the address unstaked another 500,000 HYPE tokens (totaling exactly 1 million HYPE), with the tokens expected to arrive on September 5.
As initiating HIP-4 requires a stake of 500,000 HYPE, and if the deployer had previously deployed HIP-3, an additional 500,000 HYPE is required. Considering the above on-chain movements, Unit Labs is highly likely targeting HIP-4, but it is not yet certain whether the new HIP-4 will continue to use the trade.xyz name (more likely to use unit.xyz).
trade.xyz itself is one of the most successful examples of the HIP-3 model. Unit Labs has proven that they can turn Hyperliquid's underlying infrastructure into a truly usable trading product.
If HIP-4 replicates the successful HIP-3 model, then trade.xyz and Unit Labs clearly have the most mature experience and user base. The stock, index, and commodity trading business already present in trade.xyz can naturally synergize with related event markets—traders trading an asset may also wish to trade around earnings reports, price breakouts, or macro events.
However, as of now, further attention is still needed on Unit Labs' specific product planning and deployment progress for HIP-4. Compared to the already launched Outcome and Skew, their biggest advantage lies in having “won once,” but whether they will fully commit to this new competition remains a key factor in determining if they will emerge as winners.
The Battle Has Just Begun
From Outcome to Skew, and now to the trade.xyz (Unit Labs) that is suspected to be preparing to enter, the first batch of Builders for HIP-4 has begun to emerge. However, from the current perspective, this competition is still in a very early stage.
The two projects that have just been deployed are still in their early stages, with a limited market size, transaction volume, and user base; and the specific product form of trade.xyz (Unit Labs) has not even been revealed yet. It is clearly too early to determine who will ultimately come out on top, and whether HIP-4 can replicate the success of HIP-3 is also unanswered.
But precisely because it is still in its early stages, HIP-4 leaves ample room for Builders. The prediction market itself is a sufficiently vast track, ranging from financial assets and macro data to sports events and breaking news; theoretically, almost any event with a clear outcome can become a trading market. Hyperliquid provides a unified trading and settlement infrastructure, but what Builders truly need to compete on is how to design markets, acquire users, and solve liquidity.
This is also the biggest challenge facing HIP-4 next. Open deployment itself does not guarantee success; whether a prediction market can ultimately take off still depends on whether there are enough traders willing to participate and whether both buyers and sellers can sustain liquidity. The more markets there are, the more likely it is that liquidity will be further dispersed; finding a balance between "rapid market creation" and "concentrated limited liquidity" will be a question that all Builders need to address.
HIP-3 has proven that Hyperliquid's permissionless model can indeed produce successful cases like trade.xyz. Now, the track for HIP-4 has just opened. Who will become the trade.xyz of the prediction market version? There is no answer yet, but what can be determined is that with more and more Builders entering the scene, what Hyperliquid is vying for this time is not just the perpetual contract market, but a much broader "trade everything" market.
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