Hyperliquid HIP-4 Outcome Markets vs Polymarket and Kalshi

Hyperliquid's HIP-4 outcome markets are a small venue with a different design. In the 30 days to November 10, 2026 they traded $125.3 million, according to DefiLlama, about 0.5% of the $23.8 billion that Kalshi and Polymarket's two venues traded in the same window. They charge a fraction of Polymarket's and Kalshi's taker fees, let anyone with 500,000 staked HYPE list markets, and resolve those markets without a public dispute process. On November 11, sports made up 94% of the contracts traded.

All Hyperliquid figures below come from its public info API, read at 22:36 UTC (5:36 p.m. ET) on November 11, 2026, unless stated otherwise. Polymarket and Kalshi figures were read from their public APIs between 22:41 and 22:47 UTC.

What the market is pricing

Bitcoin traded near $74,078 on Hyperliquid's perpetual market at the time. The two venues list similar November "touch" contracts and similar daily contracts on bitcoin. Prices are midpoints of the best bid and ask.

Contract	HIP-4 (%)	Polymarket (%)	As of
BTC reaches $90,000 by month-end	5.15	4.25	Nov 11, 2026
BTC reaches $85,000 by month-end	11.7	12.5	Nov 11, 2026
BTC falls to $70,000 by month-end	48.8	48.5	Nov 11, 2026
BTC falls to $65,000 by month-end	15.25	15.5	Nov 11, 2026
BTC above strike on Nov 12 (HIP-4: $73,909 at 06:00 UTC; Polymarket: $74,000 at noon ET)	63.5	56.5	Nov 11, 2026

The touch prices sit within a point of each other, but the contracts settle on different data. The HIP-4 touch markets, listed by the Outcome venue, pay Yes if a 3-second time-weighted average of Hyperliquid's own BTC perpetual mark price reaches the level by 00:00 UTC on December 1, per the market template in Hyperliquid's API. Polymarket's pay Yes if any one-minute Binance BTC/USDT candle in November, Eastern time, trades through it. The daily contracts use different strikes and settlement times, so their prices are not directly comparable. For year-end bitcoin odds, see our bitcoin page and cross-venue comparisons.

What is HIP-4?

HIP-4 adds "fully collateralized contracts that settle within a fixed range" to Hyperliquid's trading engine, according to its documentation. Each market has a Yes token and a No token. At settlement, Yes converts to a fraction between 0 and 1 of the quote token (USDC on every market we checked) and No converts to the rest. The primitive "does not involve leverage or liquidations." Yes and No order books are merged, so a bid for Yes at 60 cents is also an offer of No at 40 cents.

The first market was a recurring bitcoin contract settling daily at 06:00 UTC. HIP-4 launched in May 2026, The Block reported, and DefiLlama's volume series begins on May 2. On November 11 the protocol ran daily above-or-below contracts on bitcoin, ether, solana and HYPE, plus a three-bucket bitcoin price question.

Who can deploy an outcome market?

Since August 29, 2026, anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE, crypto.news reported. Hyperliquid first described the terms in July: validators can vote to cut or remove a deployer's stake for poorly defined markets, wrong settlement, or failure to settle within a week, and the stake is locked for six months, The Block reported. Hyperliquid's deployer documentation gives the same 183-day minimum before a deployer can deactivate.

Deployers do not write their own rules. Validators vote on templates that fix each market's text, side names and inputs, and a market that contradicts its template is "malformed and slashable." On November 11 the API listed 28 approved templates, covering sports, crypto and stock prices, central bank rate decisions, IPOs, awards and AI model head-to-heads.

The API showed four deployer venues, each staking between 500,718 and 508,502 HYPE. At HYPE's price of $71.84 that afternoon, 500,000 HYPE was worth about $35.9 million.

Venue	HYPE staked	Share of 24h contracts
out (Outcome)	508,502	98.9%
skew	500,765	under 0.1%
txyz	502,007	under 0.1%
fox	500,719	0%
Protocol-run recurring markets	none	1.0%

Outcome's documentation gives its HIP-4 venue name as OUT. crypto.news named Skew as a second venue in September; we could not tie txyz or fox to a company from primary sources. Outcome had used all of its active-market capacity, with zero slots remaining across 200 listed outcomes, per the API's deployer limits.

How does resolution differ from UMA and Kalshi?

The three venues answer "who decides" in three different ways.

• HIP-4 protocol markets settle automatically. The daily bitcoin contract resolves on a linear interpolation of Hyperliquid's BTC mark price around 06:00 UTC, per its contract specification.
• HIP-4 deployer markets are settled by the deployer, which sends a settlement action onchain. Outcome says it uses "a proprietary resolution system" built with oracle partners it has not named, settles price markets on Hyperliquid mark prices, and fixes sports results once the official source publishes, after which "later appeals, corrections or reversals do not change the outcome," per its resolution page. The backstop is the 500,000 HYPE stake and a validator vote.
• Polymarket resolves most markets through UMA's Optimistic Oracle. Anyone can propose an outcome by posting a bond, typically $750; a 2-hour challenge period follows, and a second dispute sends the question to a vote of UMA token holders, which takes 4 to 6 days in total, per Polymarket's documentation. Short up-or-down crypto markets settle on a Chainlink time-weighted price instead.
• Kalshi is a CFTC-registered exchange, as Phantom's launch post describes it. Each market names a source agency, and "our markets team finalizes the result," usually within about 3 hours of the outcome, per its help center. Its daily bitcoin contracts settle on a 60-second average of CF Benchmarks' bitcoin index.

Our read: HIP-4 replaces UMA's open dispute window with a staked bond, and Kalshi's regulator with a validator vote. Polymarket's V2 contracts add an oracle aggregator for new markets, The Block reported; our V2 rollout report has the schedule.

What does it cost to trade?

HIP-4 charges nothing to open a position. Fees apply "when closing or settling," per Hyperliquid's fee schedule, and outcome markets pay no maker rebates. Hyperliquid's HIP-4 page still says fees "are currently zero," but DefiLlama's methodology dates protocol fees from August 15, 2026, and fills we pulled from the API on November 11 show them charged:

• A base-tier account selling the daily bitcoin contract as a taker paid 0.07% of sale value, and 0.07% of the $1 payout when a winning position settled. Buys paid nothing.
• A maker selling an Outcome-listed bitcoin touch contract paid twice the rate it paid on the protocol's daily contract, matching the deployer fee scale of 1 that every Outcome market carried.

Polymarket charges takers C × rate × p × (1 − p), with a rate of 0.07 for crypto and 0.05 for sports, and makers nothing, per its fee page. Kalshi's general formula is 0.07 × C × P × (1 − P), rounded up to the next cent, per Allium.

On 100 contracts bought and sold at 50 cents by a taker, by our arithmetic:

Venue	Fee to buy	Fee to sell	Round trip
HIP-4, protocol market	$0	$0.035	$0.035
HIP-4, Outcome market (fee scale 1)	$0	$0.07	$0.07
Polymarket, crypto	$1.75	$1.75	$3.50
Kalshi, general	$1.75	$1.75	$3.50

Front ends can add builder fees on top of HIP-4's rate. Outcome says its own builder fee is currently zero.

How much trades on HIP-4?

Venue	30 days to Nov 10, 2026	October 2026
Kalshi	$17.78 billion	$16.62 billion
Polymarket US	$3.17 billion	$3.36 billion
Polymarket international	$2.72 billion	$2.65 billion
Hyperliquid HIP-4	$125.3 million	$74.6 million

Source: DefiLlama, which counts the dollar value paid per trade on each venue. HIP-4's monthly volume was $47.2 million in May, $74.1 million in June and $58.5 million in July, then fell to $11.5 million in August, the month Hyperliquid began charging outcome fees. It recovered to $39.8 million in September and $74.6 million in October, and reached $62.8 million in the first ten days of November. Cumulative volume since launch was $368.4 million.

What trades is mostly sport. Of the 12.48 million HIP-4 contracts traded in the 24 hours to 22:36 UTC on November 11, 93.9% were in sports markets, 4.1% in bitcoin, ether, solana and HYPE price markets, 1.5% in stock and commodity prices, and the rest in Fed and IPO markets, by our classification of the API's template names. The most active crypto markets were Outcome's bitcoin $65,000 touch contract, at 96,654 contracts, and the protocol's daily bitcoin contract, at 92,690.

Matched markets show where the gap is smallest and where it is widest:

Market	HIP-4 (24h, contracts)	Polymarket (24h, dollars)	Kalshi (24h, contracts)
Lakers vs. Bucks, Nov 11	153,568	$213,282 (moneyline)	603,100
Magic vs. Bucks, Nov 13	147,283	$603	1,242
BTC touch $85,000 in November	57,762	$20,512	not listed
BTC daily above-strike, Nov 12 expiry	92,690 (one strike)	$176,295 (11 strikes)	35,878 (event opened 21:00 UTC)

Each HIP-4 and Kalshi contract pays $1; Polymarket reports dollars traded. Kalshi's previous daily bitcoin event, settling at 5 p.m. ET on November 11, traded 2.66 million contracts over its life.

Why does a game two days out trade so much?

On HIP-4, the Magic-Bucks game on November 13 traded about as many contracts as the Lakers-Bucks game scheduled for that night. On Polymarket and Kalshi it barely traded. Outcome runs a liquidity program that pays from a fixed daily budget per eligible market: 40% for resting quotes, 50% for maker fills and 10% for taker fills, per its rewards documentation. crypto.news reported in September that an earlier $1 million Outcome campaign paid about one cent per dollar traded.

Our read: on that evidence, a large share of HIP-4's sports volume is paid-for liquidity rather than demand. Public data does not show which trades were rewarded, so we cannot size it. For comparing venues, HIP-4's prices are a more reliable signal than its volume.

Who can trade it?

Outcome says it is unavailable in the United States, certain Canadian provinces and sanctioned territories, per its risk page. US residents can trade on Kalshi and on Polymarket US, the US exchange Polymarket relaunched in December 2025, per Front Office Sports, and are close-only on Polymarket's international venue, per its geoblock documentation. Our short-duration contracts report covers the faster crypto formats on those two venues.

What to watch

• Templates: each new validator-approved template widens what deployers can list; the count was 28 on November 11.
• Deployer capacity: Outcome was at its limit of active markets. Higher limits would let its listings grow.
• Crypto share: whether bitcoin and ether markets grow past 4% of contracts as incentive programs change.
• A first slashing vote: none has been reported, and how validators handle a disputed settlement will test the model.