HIP-4 is Hyperliquid’s new primitive for outcome markets, extending HyperCore beyond spot and perpetuals into dated, fully collateralized contracts that settle to a bounded value at expiry. Instead of relying on leverage, funding, liquidations, or a continuously updated mark price, each market is collateralized upfront and trades as a claim on a defined settlement event. At expiry, an authorized broadcaster posts the final settlement value, and the contract resolves against the pre-funded collateral base.

Hyperliquid is starting with curated, USDH-denominated canonical markets tied to objective settlement sources, with broader deployer participation expected over time. While much of the market discussion has focused on HIP-4’s prediction-market angle, the broader significance is that HyperCore can now support bounded, event-contingent payoff design directly inside its existing execution and collateral system.

HIP-4 continues HyperCore’s progression into a broader financial execution layer: HIP-1 introduced native assets and spot order books, HIP-3 expanded the venue into builder-deployed perpetuals, and HIP-4 adds outcome contracts. HIP-3 gave deployers control over market creation; HIP-4 extends that design space to payoff construction. Instead of only deciding which asset trades, deployers can define how claims resolve across various structures. This broadens HyperCore’s product surface beyond spot and perpetual style contracts into structured payoffs around prices, rates, spreads, volatility, and protocol risk.

Methodology Note

Hyperliquid has not yet published a complete HIP-4 deployer specification or detailed HIP-4 documentation. Where official documentation exists, we cite it directly. For implementation-level mechanics, we rely on independent hl-node binary analysis, live transaction traces, reverse-engineered interpretations of transaction payloads and state transitions, and indexed data from Liquid Terminal.

We acknowledge @Yaugourt and @androolloyd for their work in advancing public understanding of HIP-4's implementation details. These details should be treated as best-effort research intended to contextualize HIP-4 ahead of complete official documentation. We will update our coverage as more information becomes available.

HIP-4 Architecture

HIP-4 adapts HyperCore’s existing deployment and orderbook infrastructure to dated outcome contracts. A HIP-3 deployer can launch an event market from the same deployment slot, using the same 500K HYPE stake. The only addition is the outcome module: including it in the deployment request creates an outcome market, while omitting it produces a standard perpetual.

A deployer encodes an OutcomeDeploy request that defines the market, expiry, settlement source, collateral asset, payoff range, and authorized settlement broadcaster. Where a standard perpetual depends on continuous oracle updates, funding, margining, and liquidation logic, a HIP-4 market is a pre-funded, fixed-range claim on a terminal outcome. Price discovery occurs through HyperCore’s CLOB during the trading window; settlement occurs once at expiry.

This flexibility at the payoff-function layer is the defining feature of HIP-4. HIP-3 let deployers list any asset, provided there is a reference price, but the payoff remains that of a standard perpetual. HIP-4 lets deployers define custom payouts for these markets. For example, HIP-3 could support an AAPL perpetual; HIP-4 could support markets that resolve based on whether AAPL closes above a set level, stays within a defined range, or reports EPS above a specified consensus estimate.

At expiry, the authorized broadcaster posts the final settlement value, typically against an objective source for canonical markets. Once settlement is accepted, open orders are canceled, trading halts, and positions settle against the pre-funded collateral base.

The diagram below maps the main decisions in an outcome deployment: defining the event, selecting the settlement authority, setting the expiry, choosing the payoff range, and registering the tradable outcome tokens.

Once deployed, the market enters an opening auction before continuous trading begins. The auction collects orders without immediate execution, then clears at a single price before remaining orders roll into the live CLOB. From there, outcome tokens trade until expiry, when the authorized broadcaster posts the final settlement value and positions resolve against the pre-funded collateral base.

HIP-4 Implementations

Following the settlement process above, HIP-4 markets appear simple: a pre-funded claim trades until expiry, a broadcaster posts the final value, and collateral is distributed accordingly. In practice, the primitive is highly customizable. For example, while HIP-4 has binary options, frontends may represent a market as an N-way question, bundling a set of Yes/NO legs on the backend in HyperCore.

This flexibility can be mapped across three dimensions: settlement input, observation mode, and payoff shape. Settlement input defines what the market resolves against, from prices and rates to onchain states, protocol metrics, real-world outcomes, or external data feeds. Observation mode defines how that input is measured, whether at expiry, over a window, by extrema, duration, or threshold breach. Payoff shape defines how the observed result is translated into value, whether binary, scalar, range-based, or composed from multiple legs. Together, these dimensions allow deployers to turn measurable risks into bounded, tradable claims.

The visual below maps the most relevant HIP-4 implementations to existing TradFi payoff structures. The strongest early opportunities are the products most closely connected to HyperCore’s existing activity: strike ladders, range markets, funding-rate hedges, and basis trades.

Because of this flexibility, we believe the market is over-indexing on HIP-4 as Hyperliquid’s entry into prediction markets. Prediction-market style outcomes are only one application of the primitive. Just as HIP-3 enabled RWAs, pre-IPOs, volatility contracts, and other synthetic markets, HIP-4’s value comes from the range of payoff functions that can be added to HyperCore’s native execution, collateral, and settlement layer.

Hyperliquid Ecosystem

Like HIP-3, HIP-4 will distribute market creation and monetization across Hyperliquid’s modular stack. HyperCore provides the execution layer; deployers create and curate markets; builders distribute those markets to users. Hyperliquid gains a third product primitive alongside spot and perpetuals, with a new fee surface, deeper USDH utility, and increased strategic value for deployer slots. Existing HIP-3 deployers can broaden their monetizable surface without additional staking capital. Builders gain native outcome-market infrastructure that can be routed through their own frontends, while user collateral remains inside HyperCore rather than fragmenting across external venues.

The sections below break down how HIP-4 can accrue value across each layer of the stack.

Hyperliquid

To understand the significance of HIP-4, we first need to contextualize Hyperliquid’s approach to building a performant L1 that can house all of finance. Unlike general-purpose L1s, which prioritize broad smart-contract programmability across DeFi, consumer applications, and onchain infrastructure, Hyperliquid has taken a narrower approach: it embeds high-performance financial primitives directly into HyperCore. Each primitive adds a specific market function, and Hyperliquid typically launches the canonical version first before opening the design space to deployers.

Each additional building block allows more activity types to settle on Hyperliquid’s base layer. Traditional L1s start with breadth and try to improve performance over time. Hyperliquid started from the opposite direction: extreme performance across a narrow set of exchange-native actions, then progressively adding new financial primitives onto the same execution, collateral, and settlement stack.

This framing makes the strategic implication of HIP-4 straightforward: Hyperliquid’s constraint is breadth, not performance. HIP-4 expands the set of products that can settle on HyperCore. Phantom, Hyperliquid’s largest builder, is a good example of why this matters. The multichain wallet already routes perps through Hyperliquid, while other activity remains fragmented across L1-native spot venues and external platforms such as Kalshi for event markets.

As HyperCore adds more primitives, more activity can consolidate around the same composable infrastructure. For builders, that reduces the need to maintain separate venue integrations and makes HyperCore a more viable default execution backend. For traders, HIP-4 enables layered positions inside the same engine: for example, pairing a long AAPL view with a contract that pays out if AAPL misses a specified EPS estimate.

Economically, this value will accrue to Hyperliquid through multiple channels: new fees alongside spot and perps, increased demand for HYPE-staked deployer slots, continued slot-auction demand for outcome listings, and deeper USDH utility as default collateral.

However, while HIP-4 creates value across the stack, we believe the market is likely overestimating what accrues directly through HyperCore execution fees. Fees remain early and configurable: outcome-token trades follow the spot schedule of 7 bps taker / 4 bps maker before discounts, while prediction-market specific fees are currently zero and adjustable through SetOutcomeFeeScale. To frame the order of magnitude, we model a generous upper-bound scenario: if Hyperliquid captured 100% of Polymarket’s annualized 30-day volume at an 11 bps blended maker/taker rate, HIP-4 would generate $62.3 million in gross fees, equal to a 7.4% uplift to Hyperliquid’s $844 million 2025 revenue base. Even under aggressive assumptions, direct fees remain modest relative to Hyperliquid’s core spot and perp business.

The market's misconception around HIP-4's fee potential likely stems from framing it as Hyperliquid's entry into the prediction-market duopoly. While directionally understandable, this framing misses the more important point: Polymarket and Kalshi are consumer distribution businesses, while HyperCore is market infrastructure.

Polymarket and Kalshi sit at the top of the retail funnel. Their advantages are consumer UX, market curation, brand, media attention, partnerships, and, in Kalshi's case, regulated access to U.S. event contracts. Their product surfaces are organized around attention-heavy categories such as politics, sports, culture, and macro events, rather than primarily around institutional hedging demand. These are consumer acquisition businesses built around narrative and retail engagement, monetizing users who are unlikely to choose venues primarily on execution cost.

Lower fees alone are therefore unlikely to pull this flow to Hyperliquid. Competing directly would require Hyperliquid to build a comparable retail acquisition machine, which is not its natural role. Hyperliquid has taken the opposite approach, outsourcing retail acquisition to third-party builders entirely.

HIP-4’s stronger path is to let builders compete at the consumer layer while HyperCore captures the market layer. In practice, that means accepting lower near-term monetization than retail-facing venues in exchange for a broader network of integrated builders, deeper collateral retention, and more activity settling inside HyperCore over time.

As a result, the second-order effects may matter more than direct trading fees: greater collateral retention, deeper USDH adoption, stronger ecosystem lock-in, and more activity settling inside HyperCore. Below, we show how incremental USDH adoption from HIP-4 markets could exceed the revenue impact of even generous direct fee assumptions.

Deployers

If HIP-4 is understood as a customizable building block rather than a single product, deployers are the mechanism through which its design space gets explored. Once permissionless deployment is enabled, deployers can compete to bring differentiated markets, payoff structures, and event-risk products onto HyperCore.

HIP-3 has already validated how powerful this distribution can be. Once deployment rights moved beyond the core team, deployers expanded Hyperliquid’s market surface beyond standard crypto perpetuals into more exotic instruments, including RWAs, pre-IPO exposures, volatility indices, and other synthetic listings. Of the 104 new markets listed in 2026, 98 came from HIP-3 deployers. They capture 50% of generated fees, earning $17.79 million in Q1 despite growth-mode pricing, making them one of the clearest beneficiaries of Hyperliquid’s modular model.

Along with listing perpetuals, these deployers can now structure new forms of tradable risk: strike ladders, range markets, funding-rate hedges, basis trades, volatility-style exposures, and other bounded payoffs tied to observable outcomes. In that sense, HIP-3 lets deployers expand the asset universe; HIP-4 lets them expand the payoff universe.

Unlike HIP-3, where Hyperliquid effectively outsourced new market creation to deployers, the initial HIP-4 markets are being launched by Hyperliquid itself, with BTC expiry markets first. Originally, we wondered whether this was evidence of Hyperliquid competing vertically in the deployer layer, similar to other areas where the team has moved in-house: building native borrow/lend rather than leaving the opportunity entirely to HyperEVM applications, and launching its own mobile frontend despite the builder-code model. The motivation would be straightforward: deployers may be capturing an arguably disproportionate share of revenue from markets that still rely on HyperCore’s infrastructure and user flow.

However, we think the initial HIP-4 rollout is better understood as analogous to Hyperliquid’s foundation-listed crypto perpetuals before HIP-3. Hyperliquid will likely deploy some canonical outcome markets itself, especially crypto-native markets with objective settlement sources, such as BTC expiry markets and bucketed price outcomes. But we expect this to remain limited. Hyperliquid’s neutrality favors objective settlement sources, while regulatory considerations favor a crypto-native initial scope.

That leaves the field open for deployers to compete across the rest of the outcome-market design space. Early competition will likely center on the highest-volume consumer categories, especially prediction and sports markets, as deployers try to secure the first listings surfaced on Hyperliquid’s frontend. As the design space becomes clearer, they can expand into more advanced primitives around funding, basis, volatility, protocol risk, and structured payoffs.

Still, these markets will likely carry the same low direct-fee profile, which may push deployers toward the builder layer, where they can own retail distribution and add their own fees.

Builders

The third layer of Hyperliquid’s stack is builders: frontends, wallets, broker-like apps, and consumer interfaces that acquire users and route flow into HyperCore. Functionally, they are the distribution layer. They bring retail users into the Hyperliquid ecosystem, with 10.36M cumulative builder-user instances, roughly 15% of active users, and $72.5M in cumulative builder fees.

Many of these frontends are not native Hyperliquid applications. They are wallets and consumer apps with existing moats in their own ecosystems, such as Phantom on SVM or Rabby on EVM, that use Hyperliquid as their execution backend for perps. Builder codes were the first meaningful unlock for this model. HIP-4 extends the same logic from perpetuals into outcome markets.

For these frontends, HIP-4 is a backend economics upgrade. A wallet or broker-like app that already owns the user relationship previously had to route prediction-market flow through external venues such as Polymarket or Kalshi. With HIP-4, the same frontend can route outcome-market flow through HyperCore instead, reducing infrastructure costs from roughly 50–100 bps to 4–7 bps while layering its own fees on top.

The result is that the builder model that worked for perpetuals can now extend beyond perps to a wider set of primitives. Each additional product routed through HyperCore makes the integration stickier: builders can monetize more user activity through one backend, while Hyperliquid captures more execution, collateral, settlement, and USDH flow.

Conclusion

HIP-4 is another step in HyperCore’s transition from a spot and perp venue into a unified execution layer for financial primitives. By introducing dated, fully collateralized outcome contracts, Hyperliquid expands beyond directional exposure into conditional payoff design. Binary markets, scalar contracts, multi-outcome questions, strike ladders, range trades, funding and basis hedges, volatility-style products, depeg insurance, and structured payoffs can now share the same CLOB, collateral base, user accounts, and settlement infrastructure.

Deployers expand the market surface by experimenting with new events, payoff structures, and resolution designs. Builders expand the user surface by routing existing wallet, broker, and consumer-frontend flow into HyperCore. Hyperliquid can let both layers compete for markets and users while retaining the backend economics.

Our view is that HIP-4’s value will be measured less by standalone prediction-market fees and more by the compounding effect of adding another primitive to HyperCore. Each new product category makes the platform harder to route around. As spot, perps, outcome contracts, and future primitives converge on the same infrastructure, Hyperliquid moves closer to becoming the financial backend for builders rather than a single-product exchange.

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