Author | Azuma(@azuma_eth)
On August 29th, Outcome, the prediction market project within the Hyperliquid ecosystem, officially announced its deployment on the Hyperliquid mainnet as the first permissionless HIP-4 Builder project. To secure this entry ticket, the Outcome team staked 500,000 HYPE as collateral, valued at approximately $42 million at the time.
The launch of Outcome signifies that Hyperliquid has officially fired the first shot of permissionless deployment for HIP-4, and also marks the entry of Hyperliquid's expansion in the prediction market track into the Builder era.
Against the backdrop where leading platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have already captured significant user bases and market mindshare, Hyperliquid clearly finds it difficult to catch up by merely creating a few markets itself. The chosen path is to open up its core expertise—on-chain trading, order books, margin, and settlement infrastructure—and delegate the tasks of finding users, operating products, and creating markets to third-party teams within the ecosystem.
This is the same path previously taken by HIP-3. Today, custom markets created by third-party Builders have become a crucial part of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with trade.xyz standing out as one of the most representative success stories.
Now, the same question lies before HIP-4 — as Hyperliquid opens the stage of prediction markets to third-party players, who will be the first to find users, establish liquidity, and ultimately become the trade.xyz of prediction markets?
Aside from the already launched Outcome, teams such as Unit, Skew, and trade.xyz have also expressed interest or begun laying the groundwork for HIP-4. A battle for the Hyperliquid prediction market gateway, liquidity, and users has now commenced.
What is HIP-4? (Skip if familiar)
Simply put, HIP-4 is Hyperliquid's "Outcome Markets" mechanism, allowing users to trade based on the outcome of a future event.
Taking 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 were intraday binary contracts related to BTC prices, where users could trade on whether BTC would be above a specified price at a certain time.
From a product perspective, this allows HIP-4 to naturally host a wide range of trading scenarios like prediction markets and binary options. However, one of the biggest differences from platforms like Polymarket is that HIP-4 is not attempting to build a standalone prediction market. Instead, it is directly built upon Hyperliquid's HyperCore trading infrastructure, sharing the underlying trading and settlement systems with existing spot and perpetual contracts.
Permissionless deployment is the most critical next-phase change for HIP-4. In the future, validators will no longer need to review each specific event market individually. Instead, they will first approve standardized templates. Third-party Builders can then create specific markets within the framework of these templates and share fee revenue with Hyperliquid. As the cost for obtaining this permission, the deployer needs to stake 500,000 HYPE (the same as HIP-3), which must be locked for 6 months, and bear corresponding responsibility for the normal operation and settlement of the markets.
In other words, Hyperliquid's goal is not just to become the next Polymarket itself, but more like building a foundational trading facility for prediction markets and letting different teams compete based on the same underlying infrastructure.
HIP-3 has already proven that this model can cultivate projects like trade.xyz; now it's HIP-4's turn, and new Builders have begun entering the arena.
- Odaily Note: Refer to "HIP-4 Opens Permissionless Deployment, Can Hyperliquid Kill Polymarket?"
Outcome: Striking First
As the first deployed market, Outcome is clearly the player with the fastest progress in the HIP-4 ecosystem.
As early as May this year, Outcome publicly stated that it had independently raised 500,000 HYPE; following the opening of HIP-4 permissionless deployment, it quickly announced being the first team to deploy a market on the mainnet. According to the Outcome team's description, this 500,000 HYPE was staked as collateral, providing over $42 million in economic guarantees for its market integrity.
Looking at its product direction, Outcome's current plan covers cryptocurrencies, stocks, indices, commodities, and sports events. It has already launched 28 prediction events, with cumulative trading volume reaching $1.16 million within 2 days of launch. To capture early liquidity, Outcome also initiated a trading rewards program totaling over $1 million.
In summary, Outcome's biggest advantage is being first — it no longer needs to explain to the market "what it is preparing to do," but has already entered the actual operation phase.
However, being "first" does not guarantee becoming the largest. The real challenge of prediction markets is not just deploying contracts, but continuously creating markets with trading value and solving issues of liquidity, user acquisition, and market distribution. What Outcome needs to prove next is whether it can transform the "early bird" label into a genuine scale advantage.
Skew: The Second Project to Launch
Following Outcome, another HIP-4 Builder project, Skew, completed the deployment of its first event contract on the Hyperliquid mainnet this morning.
Skew's biggest advantage is its partnership with the Nasdaq-listed company Hyperion DeFi, which will provide the 500,000 HYPE required for staking. Notably, Hyperion DeFi's collaboration with Skew in July was initially focused on HIP-3 to build perpetual contract markets for institutional clients, but quickly pivoted to HIP-4 in August.
According to Skew's disclosures on official social media, the project previously opened registration for testing eligibility. As of August 6th, over 40,000 unique users had registered to apply for Skew's private testing qualifications.
While these 40,000 registered test users do not entirely represent the final active user base, and the actual conversion rate remains to be seen, it at least indicates that Skew has accumulated some potential demand before the product's official launch.
trade.xyz: The Previous Champion, Also Joining the Fray
trade.xyz is the most unique contender in this competition. The question posed by this article is "Who will become the new trade.xyz," but interestingly, Unit Labs, the development team behind trade.xyz, is already regarded by the market as a potential participant in HIP-4.
Community monitoring discovered that Unit Labs recently first significantly increased its HYPE purchases, then adjusted its HYPE staking structure in a "500,000" unit-sensitive manner:
- First, the address that deployed trade.xyz HIP-3 withdrew 500,000 HYPE from the Infinitefield validator node and staked it to the Hyperliquid Strategies × Unit validator node.
- Subsequently, the same address unstaked another 500,000 HYPE (totaling exactly 1,000,000 HYPE), and these tokens are expected to be received by September 5th.
Since launching HIP-4 requires staking 500,000 HYPE, and if the deployer has already deployed HIP-3, an additional 500,000 HYPE is needed. Considering the on-chain movements above, it is highly likely that Unit Labs is targeting HIP-4, though it's uncertain whether the new HIP-4 project will continue under the trade.xyz name (more likely unit.xyz).
trade.xyz itself is one of the most successful cases of the HIP-3 model. Unit Labs has already proven its ability to turn Hyperliquid's underlying infrastructure into a genuinely used trading product.
If HIP-4 replicates the successful model of HIP-3, then trade.xyz and Unit Labs obviously possess the most mature experience and user base. trade.xyz's existing business in stocks, indices, and commodities also naturally synergizes with related event markets — traders dealing with a particular asset might also wish to trade outcome markets related to earnings reports, price breakouts, or macroeconomic events.
However, as of now, we still need to pay closer attention to Unit Labs' specific product plans and deployment progress for HIP-4. Compared to the already launched Outcome and Skew, their biggest advantage is "having won once before," but whether they will fully commit to this new competition remains key to determining if they can become a winner again.
The Battle Has Just Begun
From Outcome to Skew, and the suspected incoming contender trade.xyz (Unit Labs), the first batch of HIP-4 Builders has begun to emerge. However, as it stands, this competition is still in a very early stage.
The two projects that have completed deployment are just starting out, with their market numbers, trading volumes, and user scales still quite limited; meanwhile, the specific product form of trade.xyz (Unit Labs) has not even been revealed. It's clearly too early to judge who will ultimately prevail, and the question of whether HIP-4 can replicate the success of HIP-3 similarly lacks an answer.
But precisely because it's still early, HIP-4 still offers ample room for Builders. The prediction market itself is a sufficiently vast field. From financial assets and macroeconomic data to sports events and breaking news, theoretically, almost any event with a clear outcome can become a trading market. Hyperliquid provides unified trading and settlement infrastructure, while what Builders truly need to compete on is how to design markets, acquire users, and solve liquidity problems.
This is also HIP-4's biggest challenge moving forward. Open deployment itself does not equal success. Whether a prediction market can ultimately thrive still depends on whether enough traders are willing to participate and whether buyers and sellers can continuously provide liquidity. More markets could also mean liquidity becomes further fragmented; finding a balance between "rapidly creating new markets" and "concentrating limited liquidity" will be a problem all Builders need to address.
HIP-3 has already proven that Hyperliquid's permissionless model can indeed produce successful cases like trade.xyz. Now, as the HIP-4 track has just opened, who will become the trade.xyz of prediction markets? There is no answer yet — but what is certain is that, as more and more Builders enter, what Hyperliquid is contending for this time is not just the perpetual contract market, but the broader market of "trading everything."
