El volumen de negociación del primer día aplasta a Polymarket, Hyperliquid irrumpe en el mercado de predicciones con opciones binarias de BTC

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Asher (__@Asher 0210_)_

May 2nd, Hyperliquid launched HIP-4 Outcome Markets on the mainnet, officially bringing result markets into its on-chain trading system. The first to go live are BTC intraday binary outcome contracts, allowing users to trade around whether BTC’s price at a specific time exceeds a designated level. Contract prices fluctuate between 0.001 and 0.999, reflecting the market’s pricing of the event’s probability; upon event occurrence, settlement is 1, if not, settlement is 0, contracts are fully collateralized with USDH, and opening a position incurs no fee.

This is not just a simple product expansion. In the past, Polymarket was more like an information market centered around events, where users entered specific markets based on elections, sports, geopolitical conflicts, or crypto hot topics, expressing their judgment on outcomes through prices; Kalshi, on the other hand, aimed to place event contracts within a clearer regulatory framework.

Hyperliquid’s approach is different. It does not first build an independent prediction market to attract user capital migration, but directly integrates result contracts into its most familiar trading scenarios—allowing result contracts to coexist with perpetuals and spot trading in the same environment. For Hyperliquid, prediction markets are not just about betting on a result, but a new tool for traders to express direction, manage risk, and develop strategies.

BTC intraday market’s first success, data exceeds expectations on the first day

HIP-4’s first market is a daily settlement BTC price performance market. This choice is inherently “Hyperliquid”—not based on politics, sports, or entertainment events, but centered around BTC price fluctuations, which are most familiar to crypto traders.

On the first day of launch, HIP-4 delivered impressive data. According to Predictefy, on the first day of Hyperliquid’s event contract, trading volume for BTC-related event contracts reached $6.15 million, far surpassing similar markets on Kalshi, Polymarket, and other prediction platforms. In other words, just looking at the niche of BTC price-related event contracts, Hyperliquid’s first day already ranks at the top.

Data source: Predictefy

Additionally, on the first day, total trading fees exceeded $12,000, with over 54,000 trades and more than 3,000 participants. For a newly launched prediction market event, this set of data is already quite eye-catching. It wasn’t achieved by spreading across many event categories, but by cold-starting within a single BTC intraday market, making HIP-4’s first step even more valuable.

Why HIP-4 is not just a simple upgrade from HIP-3

Hyperliquid has previously supported Builder deploying perpetual markets via HIP-3. So the question is, since perpetual markets are already deployable, why design HIP-4 separately? The answer lies in the completely different settlement logic of result contracts.

Perpetual contracts require continuous pricing, with oracle prices adjustable gradually; but binary outcome contracts can only settle as 0 or 1. If an oracle mechanism unsuitable for binary contracts is used, it could leave a long window of mispricing after the event result is known, creating near-riskless trading opportunities for arbitrageurs.

Therefore, HIP-4 is designed as a separate primitive for result markets. It is not a skin change of perpetuals, but a contract type specifically serving for expiry, settlement, disputes, and oracle result confirmation. For ordinary users, prediction markets may seem like just buying Yes or No; but for the actual trading system, the real challenge lies in how events are defined, who confirms them, when to settle, how disputes are handled, and how to correct and penalize erroneous results. The core of prediction markets is not just the front-end interface and trading entry points, but the settlement mechanism itself.

Hyperliquid’s battlefield compared to Polymarket and Kalshi

If we compare Hyperliquid’s HIP-4, Polymarket, and Kalshi, they represent three directions in prediction markets:

• Polymarket’s core strength is event richness and user perception: it excels at turning complex events into tradable questions, combining public attention, media coverage, and market probabilities. Political elections, geopolitical conflicts, celebrity events, sports matches, and crypto project milestones can quickly become markets.
• Kalshi’s advantage is in compliance pathways: it is closer to traditional financial contexts for event contracts, targeting users and regulatory frameworks that differ from Polymarket and Hyperliquid. Recent debates over prediction market regulation in the US, and conflicts between CFTC and state regulators, show that event contracts are no longer fringe products but are entering the core of financial regulation discussions.
• Hyperliquid’s strength lies in trading experience and capital efficiency: it has its own L1, HyperCore matching engine, on-chain order book, and infrastructure for spot and perpetuals. Official documentation states that HyperCore includes fully on-chain perpetual and spot order books, with transparent execution of orders, cancellations, trades, and settlements, capable of handling 200,000 orders per second.

Thus, Hyperliquid may not immediately take all Polymarket users in the short term. A casual user interested in US elections, sports, or entertainment gossip might not enter Hyperliquid just to buy an event contract. But a trader already dealing with BTC, ETH, gold, oil, or stocks perpetuals on Hyperliquid might naturally include BTC intraday outcome contracts as part of their portfolio.

HYPE could become the value capture tool in this competition

HIP-4’s significance for Hyperliquid is not just adding a new trading scenario; it further links prediction markets with HYPE’s staking, fee, and buyback mechanisms. According to HIP-4’s design, the first phase involves validators deploying standardized markets, and the second phase will open permissionless deployment. Future market creators will need to stake 1 million HYPE tokens. Each staking position can support rolling and periodic markets, which can be reused after settlement; if oracle manipulation, market anomalies, or long-term outages occur, staked assets may be confiscated.

This threshold is significantly higher than HIP-3’s 500,000 HYPE. The reason is straightforward: result markets depend more on event definitions and oracle settlement than perpetuals. While perpetual prices can be adjusted continuously, result markets only settle as 0 or 1. If settlement errors occur, the damage is not just to a single market’s trading experience but to the entire prediction market’s credibility.

For HYPE, HIP-4 introduces two incremental demands. One is staking demand: more Builders wanting to deploy result markets need to lock more HYPE. Especially as categories like sports, macro, politics, crypto events, and entertainment open up, high-quality market creation rights could become a high-threshold operational privilege. The second is fee and buyback logic: Hyperliquid already has strong trading volume and fee capture capabilities, with most protocol fees used for HYPE buybacks. If HIP-4 brings in new trading volume, result markets will not just be a new feature but part of the fee growth and HYPE buyback flywheel.

This is a key difference between Hyperliquid and Polymarket, Kalshi. Polymarket and Kalshi’s growth mainly reflect increases in platform trading volume, market share, and brand influence; whereas Hyperliquid’s growth will more directly translate into demand and value capture for HYPE.

Market optimism, but HIP-4 still needs to prove itself

Market feedback on HIP-4 is generally optimistic, and the reasons are simple. Hyperliquid already has mature trading infrastructure, active users, and a clear mechanism for capturing HYPE’s value. Entering prediction markets does not require rebuilding matching engines or finding initial traders from scratch.

But HIP-4 is still in very early stages. Currently, the market focus is on BTC price outcomes. Whether it can expand to sports, politics, macro, crypto events, and entertainment depends on whether the permissionless deployment in the second phase can proceed smoothly. Additionally, result markets demand higher standards for oracle and settlement mechanisms, with event definitions, data sources, dispute resolution, and error correction directly affecting market trust.

Therefore, HIP-4’s significance is not that Hyperliquid has already won the prediction market race, but that it has provided a new competitive direction. Polymarket proved that events can become information markets, Kalshi represents a compliant path for event contracts, and Hyperliquid aims to demonstrate that event contracts can also be part of on-chain trading systems.

If the past prediction market competition was about who could capture more hot events and attract more user bets, after HIP-4, a new dimension emerges: who can truly embed event outcomes into traders’ funds, positions, and strategies.

This also means that Polymarket’s competitors are no longer just Kalshi. With Hyperliquid entering, the next phase of prediction markets may not only be about competition among event markets, but also about the competition in trading systems, liquidity, and asset pricing capabilities.