Earlier this month, Trade.xyz officially completed the deployment of its prediction market product on the Hyperliquid mainnet, becoming the third HIP-4 prediction market project in the Hyperliquid ecosystem after Outcome.xyz and Skew Markets.
During its first few days of operation, Trade.xyz quietly launched 34 prediction events through the "Predict" subpage on its official website, covering Finance, Sports, and Others. However, perhaps because there had been no formal announcement, cumulative trading volume and user numbers were not particularly high — only $180,000 in total trading volume in the first week, with just 263 users.
This morning, Trade.xyz officially began promoting the product through official channels for the first time.
According to the latest announcement, Trade.xyz has named the product Events. Events will cover sports, politics, economics, and financial markets, and will continue to expand into more categories and contract formats in the future. The first batch of events related to stocks, commodities, and Pre-IPO targets will rely on the depth and liquidity of Trade.xyz perpetual contracts on HIP-3, thereby ensuring that each contract is based on the real price of Trade.xyz's highly liquid market rather than relying on external oracles.
Through Events, Trade.xyz hopes to further advance the vision of building Hyperliquid into a "universal exchange" — creating a unified and composable system for trading financial assets as well as real-world event outcomes.
More importantly, Trade.xyz has also officially added design details for Events to its product documentation, especially clarifying fee-related standards. Through these standards, we will be able to objectively compare the fee situation of Trade.xyz and Polymarket to see which one is actually cheaper.
Fee Comparison: Trade.xyz vs Polymarket
Let's first look at the fee logic of both platforms.
Trade.xyz's Events directly adopts Hyperliquid's Outcome Trading fee system. Currently, the initial configuration does not charge additional project-side fees, and users only need to pay transaction fees according to Hyperliquid's spot fee rates.
The base rates are Taker 0.07% and Maker 0.04%, and they are tiered based on the user's weighted trading volume over the past 14 days, with the highest tier reducing them to Taker 0.025% and Maker 0; in addition, staking HYPE can earn up to a 40% fee discount. It is worth noting that Events' fees are not charged when opening a position, but when closing or final settlement, and Makers do not receive additional rebates.
· Odaiy note: Events' base tiered fee rates, as well as the tiered fee rates after staking discounts (the chart only takes the highest Diamond level).
· Odaily note: Events' staking fee discounts.
Polymarket's logic is clearly different. Makers are exempt from fees and enjoy rebates ranging from 15%-25%, while Taker fees are dynamically calculated based on the market category and the probability price at the time the order is executed.
· Odaily note: Polymarket's fee parameters for different markets.
Currently, the fee parameter for Crypto markets on Polymarket is 0.07%, Sports, Economics, Culture, Weather, and other categories are 0.05%, Finance, Politics, Mentions, and Tech are 0.04%, and Geopolitics is completely free. The specific fee is calculated as C × feeRate × p × (1-p), so even with the same 0.04% fee parameter, the actual fee ultimately paid will still change with the price.
· Odaily note: How Polymarket's fee curve changes at different probabilities.
Because of this, the actual fee difference between Trade.xyz and Polymarket can be quite dramatic under different circumstances.
Let's start with the most intuitive example. Suppose a user trades $100 on an event with a 50% probability as a Taker. On Trade.xyz, based on the base 0.07% Taker fee rate, the fee would be approximately $0.07. On Polymarket, if it falls under the Finance, Politics, or other categories with a 0.04 fee rate parameter, calculated as C × feeRate × p × (1-p), the fee would be approximately $1. For Sports and other categories with a 0.05 parameter, it would be approximately $1.25, and for Crypto-related markets, it would reach $1.75. In other words, when the probability is closest to 50/50 and trading competition is at its most intense, Polymarket's actual fees can be 14 to 25 times those of Trade.xyz.
However, as the event outcome gradually becomes clearer, the gap between the two narrows rapidly. The reason is that Polymarket's fees are not simply charged based on transaction volume, but are tied to p × (1-p) in the formula — the closer the probability is to 50%, the higher the fee; the closer it is to 0% or 100%, the lower the fee.
For example, for the same $100 Finance or Politics Taker trade, when the event probability rises from 50% to 90%, Polymarket's fee drops from approximately $1 to $0.36. If the probability further reaches 95%, the fee would be approximately $0.19, and at 99%, it would be only about $0.04. This means that for events that are already approaching a "certain outcome," Polymarket's dynamic fee mechanism can actually significantly reduce trading costs, and may even be lower than Trade.xyz's base Taker fee rate.
However, there is another very important variable here: Maker trades. Trade.xyz's base Maker fee rate is 0.04%, while Polymarket charges no trading fees for Makers and even offers rebate rewards. For users who habitually place limit orders and wait for the market to fill them, Polymarket's cost advantage becomes significantly amplified. Conversely, for Taker users who need rapid execution and directly consume order book liquidity, Trade.xyz still holds a considerable fee rate advantage across most mid-range probability intervals.
Moreover, the fee structures vary across different event categories. For instance, the Geopolitics market on Polymarket even charges no trading fees at all, so it is not possible to simply use a fixed fee rate to judge whether Polymarket is cheap. The actual cost also depends on "which event is being traded" and "what the current probability of the event is."
Overall, if users mainly participate in early-stage events with probabilities close to 50/50 and need to frequently take orders actively, Trade.xyz's low fixed fee advantage is very prominent; if they mainly trade geopolitical events and other tail events that are already highly skewed, or are accustomed to getting filled through Maker orders, Polymarket may have lower, or even near-zero, actual trading costs.
In other words, Trade.xyz's advantage lies in simple, stable, and low Taker costs, while Polymarket ties fees to market probability, forming a more complex dynamic fee system that may be cheaper in specific trading scenarios.
The scale gap remains enormous, but the cross-sector leader cannot be ignored
That said, based on current data, Trade.xyz is clearly not yet qualified to compete head-on with Polymarket. Its first-week trading volume of only $180,000 and 263 users still represent a gap of several orders of magnitude compared with the liquidity, user scale, and market coverage Polymarket has already built. At least at this stage, Trade.xyz looks more like a newly entered challenger than a direct competitor to Polymarket.
But if we pull our view back a bit from the prediction market itself, Trade.xyz is not without opportunity. Over the past year or so, Trade.xyz has already proven itself through HIP-3 in the Hyperliquid ecosystem in market creation, liquidity organization, and long-tail asset trading, and Events can precisely extend these accumulated capabilities further into the prediction market.
Especially in terms of fees, liquidity, and the way it combines with Hyperliquid perpetual markets, Trade.xyz is not simply copying a Polymarket, but attempting to incorporate prediction markets into Hyperliquid's unified trading system. If it can subsequently truly migrate the trading capabilities already established by HIP-3 to Events and complete a cold start with the help of Hyperliquid's users and liquidity, then Trade.xyz may not be unable to become a disruptor in the prediction market track.
Of course, all of this remains in the realm of potential for now. For prediction markets, low fees are merely one competitive factor; what truly determines the market landscape is still liquidity, user scale, event coverage, and market-forming capability. Whether Trade.xyz can replicate its advantages on HIP-3 to Events may be what is truly worth watching next.
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