Building a prediction market from scratch typically takes years of bootstrapping liquidity, onboarding market makers, and convincing traders to show up. Hyperliquid decided to skip most of that by simply bolting one onto its already-thriving perpetuals exchange.
The result: within roughly two weeks of launching its HIP-4 upgrade on May 2, Hyperliquid matched Polymarket’s BTC binary trading volume.
How HIP-4 actually works
HIP-4 introduced native binary outcome contracts to Hyperliquid’s platform. The first market posed a straightforward question: would Bitcoin be above $78,213 on May 3?
On day one alone, the platform recorded 6.05 million contracts traded across 3,000 unique users, with volumes ranging from $54K to $6M. That immediately outpaced comparable offerings from both Polymarket and Kalshi within the same window.
