Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On August 29, Hyperliquid's ecological prediction market project Outcome officially announced that it has become the first unlicensed HIP-4 Builder project to complete deployment on the Hyperliquid mainnet — to secure this entry ticket, the Outcome team has staked 500,000 HYPE as collateral, worth approximately 42 million dollars at that time.

The launch of Outcome signifies that Hyperliquid has officially fired the first shot in the HIP-4 unlicensed deployment and indicates that Hyperliquid's expansion in the prediction market track has officially entered the Builder era.

In the context where leading platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have occupied a significant amount of users and market mindshare, Hyperliquid clearly finds it difficult to catch up merely by creating a few markets on its own. The path it has chosen is to open up its strengths in on-chain trading, order books, collateral, and settlement infrastructure, delegating the tasks of user acquisition, product operation, and market creation to third-party teams within its ecosystem.

This is also the path that HIP-3 once took. Today, customized markets created by third-party Builders have become an essential component of the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with trade.xyz becoming one of the most representative successful cases.

The same question now faces HIP-4 — when Hyperliquid opens up the stage of the prediction market to third-party players, who will be the first to find users, establish liquidity, and ultimately become the prediction market version of trade.xyz?

Aside from the already launched Outcome, teams like Unit, Skew, and trade.xyz have also expressed intentions or begun to layout for HIP-4, marking the commencement of a competition for Hyperliquid's prediction market entry, liquidity, and users.

What is HIP-4? (Skip if familiar)

In simple terms, HIP-4 is the “Outcome Markets” mechanism launched by Hyperliquid, allowing users to trade around the results of a future event.

Taking the simplest binary market as an example, users can trade on “whether something will happen.” If the final result is “yes,” the contract settles at 1; if the result is “no,” it settles at 0 — the first batch of markets launched on the Hyperliquid mainnet were intra-day binary contracts related to BTC prices, where users could trade whether BTC would be above a specified price at a certain point in time.

In terms of product form, this enables HIP-4 to naturally carry a wealth of trading scenarios including prediction markets and binary options. However, one of the biggest differences compared to platforms like Polymarket is that HIP-4 does not attempt to build a standalone prediction market but is directly built on Hyperliquid's HyperCore trading infrastructure, sharing the underlying trading and settlement system with existing spot and perpetual contracts.

Unlicensed deployment is the most critical change in the next stage of HIP-4. In the future, validators will no longer need to individually review each specific event market but will first approve standardized templates; third-party Builders can then create specific markets within these template frameworks and share fee revenue with Hyperliquid. As the cost of gaining this privilege, deployers need to stake 500,000 HYPE (the same as HIP-3), with a requirement to lock for 6 months, and bear corresponding responsibilities for the normal operation and settlement of the market.

In other words, what Hyperliquid aims for is not just to become the next Polymarket, but more like setting up a foundational trading facility for prediction markets, allowing different teams to compete based on the same underlying infrastructure.

HIP-3 has proven that this model has the potential to cultivate Trade.xyz; now it is HIP-4's turn, and new Builders have also begun to enter the fray.

• Odaily Note: Refer to "HIP-4 Opens Unlicensed Deployment, Can Hyperliquid Kill Polymarket?".

Outcome: Preemptive Strike

As the first market to complete deployment, Outcome is clearly the fastest player in the HIP-4 ecosystem.

Back in May this year, Outcome publicly stated that it had raised 500,000 HYPE on its own; and after the opening of HIP-4's unlicensed deployment, it swiftly announced it was the first team to deploy a market on the mainnet. According to the Outcome team's description, these 500,000 HYPE serve as collateral, providing an economic guarantee of over 42 million dollars for the integrity of its market.

In terms of product direction, Outcome's current planning covers cryptocurrencies, stocks, indices, commodities, and sporting events, with 28 prediction events already launched and a total trading volume of 1.16 million dollars within 2 days of going live. To capture early liquidity, Outcome has also launched a trading reward program totaling over 1 million dollars.

In summary, Outcome's biggest advantage is its first-mover status — it no longer needs to explain to the market “what it is about to do,” but has taken the lead in the actual operational phase.

However, being "first" does not necessarily mean it will become the biggest. The real challenge in the prediction market is not just deploying contracts, but continuously creating markets that have trading value and resolving issues of liquidity, user acquisition, and market distribution. What Outcome must prove next is whether it can convert the "early bird" label into a genuine scale advantage.

Skew: The Second Launched Project

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 biggest advantage is its partnership with Nasdaq-listed company Hyperion DeFi, which will provide it with 500,000 HYPE to meet the staking requirements. It is worth mentioning that the collaboration direction between Hyperion DeFi and Skew in July was still HIP-3, aimed at building a perpetual contract market for institutional clients, but then quickly shifted to HIP-4 in August.

According to disclosures from Skew on official social media, the project had previously opened registration for testing qualifications, and by August 6, over 40,000 independent users had registered to apply for Skew's private testing qualifications.

Although these 40,000 test registration users do not fully represent the final active user count, and the actual conversion rate remains to be observed, it at least indicates that Skew has accumulated some potential demand before the official product launch.

trade.xyz: Last Session's Champion, Also Stepping In

trade.xyz is the most unique presence in this competition. The question posed in this article is "who will become the new trade.xyz," but interestingly, the development team of trade.xyz, Unit Labs, is also seen by the market as a potential participant in HIP-4.

Community monitoring has found that Unit Labs has recently significantly increased its purchase of HYPE and subsequently adjusted its HYPE staking structure with the "500,000" sensitive integer scale:

• First, it deployed the trade.xyz HIP-3 address to extract 500,000 HYPE from the Infinitefield validator node and staked it to the Hyperliquid Strategies × Unit validator node.
• Subsequently, the address also unstaked another 500,000 HYPE (for a total of exactly 1 million HYPE), which is set to arrive on September 5.

Since initiating HIP-4 requires staking 500,000 HYPE, and if the deployer has previously deployed HIP-3, an additional 500,000 HYPE is required. Based on the aforementioned on-chain movements, it is highly likely that Unit Labs is aiming for HIP-4, but it is still uncertain whether the new HIP-4 will retain the name trade.xyz (it is more likely to use unit.xyz).

Trade.xyz is already one of the most successful examples of the HIP-3 model, and Unit Labs has proven its ability to turn Hyperliquid's underlying infrastructure into a real trading product with actual users.

If HIP-4 is about replicating the successful model of HIP-3, then trade.xyz and Unit Labs clearly possess the most mature experience and user base. The existing businesses of trade.xyz in stocks, indices, and commodity trading can naturally synergize with related event markets — traders may wish to trade the outcome markets around earnings reports, price breakthroughs, or macro events while trading certain assets.

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 "already won once," but whether they will fully engage in this new competition remains crucial to determining if they will become winners.

The Fire Has Just Been Lit

From Outcome to Skew, and then to the seemingly preparing trade.xyz (Unit Labs), the first batch of Builders for HIP-4 has already begun to emerge. But as of now, this competition is still at a very early stage.

The two projects that have completed deployment are just starting out, with the number of markets, trading volume, and user scale still quite limited; meanwhile, the specific product form of trade.xyz (Unit Labs) has yet to be revealed. It is clearly too early to judge who will ultimately win, and whether HIP-4 can replicate the successful experience of HIP-3 also remains unanswered.

But also because it is still early, HIP-4 leaves plenty of space for Builders. The prediction market itself is a sufficiently large track, covering everything from financial assets and macro data to sporting 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, while what Builders truly need to compete over is how to design the market, attract users, and solve liquidity issues.

This is also the biggest challenge that HIP-4 faces next. Opening up deployment does not equal 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 continuously provide liquidity. The more markets there are, the more liquidity may be further dispersed; finding a balance between "rapidly creating new markets" and "concentrating limited liquidity" will be a problem that all Builders need to face.

HIP-3 has already proven that Hyperliquid's unlicensed model can indeed yield successful cases like trade.xyz. Now, with the track for HIP-4 just opening, who will become the prediction market version of trade.xyz? There is still no answer — but it is certain that with more Builders entering the scene, what Hyperliquid is competing for this time is not just the perpetual contract market, but a broader “trade everything” market.

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