What is HIP-4?

HIP-4 is Hyperliquid’s native prediction market protocol. It turns a question with a defined settlement moment into tradable outcome tokens that live on the HyperCore spot order book alongside every other spot asset, sharing the same account and the same collateral as perpetual futures. That single design choice is what separates it from prediction markets built as standalone platforms: there is no second venue, no second balance and no bespoke matching engine, just an exchange market whose payoff happens to be a question.

This page explains how outcome tokens are priced, the three market shapes the protocol supports, who is allowed to settle a market and how that differs by tier, and where permissionless deployment currently stands. For the numbers, see HIP-4 stats.

How an outcome token works

Each side of a market is its own coin with its own order book, and its price sits between $0.00 and $1.00. That price is the market-implied probability: a Yes side trading at $0.62 means the book currently prices the event at roughly 62%. At the settlement moment the winning side pays $1.00 per share and the losing side pays $0.00, so what you paid versus what it settles at is your profit or loss.

The Yes and No sides trade toward a sum of $1 because any deviation is arbitrageable against the protocol itself, not because a market maker chooses to quote it that way. HIP-4 lets collateral be split into a full set of outcome tokens and lets a full set be merged back into collateral, so a complete set is always worth $1 of collateral. Each side is still its own order book with its own spread and its own depth, so the two quoted prices can sum to a little more or a little less than $1 rather than snapping to it exactly. That arbitrage is also why you never need a counterparty to open: you can mint the set and sell the side you do not want.

Because these are order-book assets rather than positions in a platform ledger, you are not locked in until expiry. You can exit at any time at whatever the book will pay, and you can post limit orders rather than only taking a quoted price.

The three market shapes

Single-strike price threshold

One asset, one price level, one settlement time: "will this asset be above this level at this moment". Two sides, Yes and No, that together pay out $1 at settlement. This is the most common shape on the protocol.

Multi-strike price range

The same underlying carved into bands by N thresholds, producing N+1 named outcomes plus a fallback for anything outside them. Exactly one band settles at $1; the rest settle at $0. Useful when you have a view on where a price lands rather than merely which side of one level it ends on.

Custom event

A free-text question with a written resolution clause and no price feed behind it: sports fixtures, economic releases, scheduled announcements. These are the markets resolved by the Hyperliquid validator set rather than by an automatic price observation.

The shape is not a label we attach after the fact. It is encoded in the market’s own on-chain description as a structured field list, which is what makes HIP-4 markets machine-readable. A single-strike price market carries something of this form:

class:priceBinary|underlying:BTC|expiry:20260804-0600|targetPrice:62809|period:1d

Templated markets use a different grammar: a keyword-and-value list whose keywords are fixed by the approved template rather than by the protocol’s canonical class scheme. Reading the shape from the structured description rather than guessing from the market’s title is the difference between a page that keeps working when Hyperliquid ships a new template and one that quietly mislabels every market of that kind.

Who settles a market: the three trust tiers

“Who resolves this” is the question most explainers skip, and it is the one that decides whether a market is worth trading. HIP-4 has three answers, and every market declares which one applies to it.

Auto-settle (protocol)

Hyperliquid protocol code reads a price observation at the market’s expiry and settles from it. No human decision in the resolution path, and the expiry moment is published on-chain before anyone trades. The cheapest trust assumption of the three.

Validator vote (network)

The Hyperliquid validator set votes on the outcome of an off-chain event. This is the path for custom markets with a written resolution clause. The trust surface is the same one that secures bridge withdrawals on the network: no external oracle is introduced.

Deployer-settled (third party)

The settlement input on a template market is the underlying perp’s mark price at the outcome’s expiry, but the settlement ACTION is signed by the third party that deployed the market. They can settle a standalone outcome to any fraction between $0 and $1, and nobody can settle it in their place. The weakest trust assumption of the three, and the one worth checking the deployer on: who they are, and how many of their markets are currently sitting past their settlement moment with nothing signed.

Settlement comes from the mark at expiry, and there is no dispute window

On a template market the settlement input is the underlying perp’s mark price at the outcome’s expiry. The settlement action itself is a signed transaction, and only the deployer of that outcome can sign it. There is no escrowed challenge period, no bonded dispute game and no documented path for a third party to settle in their place if they simply do not.

What Hyperliquid does document is that a deployer’s stake stays locked while any of their outcomes is unsettled: deactivating as a deployer requires both having no active outcomes and having met the minimum staking duration. We do not claim that Hyperliquid slashes late HIP-4 settlement, because that is not documented anywhere in Hyperliquid’s materials and we are not going to assert a penalty that may not exist.

The practical consequence for a trader is simple. Before you take the other side of a deployer-settled market, look at who deployed it and how many of their markets are currently sitting past their settlement moment with nothing signed. That is public data, and it is on the deployers page.

Permissionless deployment: where it actually stands

Permissionless HIP-4 deployment is live on Hyperliquid testnet, where third parties have registered as deployers and are deploying markets from validator-approved templates. It is not live on Hyperliquid mainnet, and no mainnet date has been announced. On mainnet today, markets are deployed by the protocol.

Press reporting from outlets including The Block, KuCoin and CoinGape puts the staking threshold for permissionless mainnet deployment at 500,000 HYPE. Hyperliquid’s own documentation does not publish a figure, so treat that as reporting rather than protocol specification.

Validator-approved template registry, read live from Hyperliquid mainnet

There are currently no approved outcome templates on Hyperliquid mainnet, which is what you would expect while permissionless deployment is not enabled here. The moment a template is approved it will appear in this list.

How to trade a HIP-4 market

1
Fund a wallet on Hyperliquid
HIP-4 markets are quoted in USDC on HyperCore. Bridge USDC across from any supported chain, or deposit natively. Everything executes through your own wallet; there is no platform account.
2
Pick a market
Choose between single-strike price questions, multi-strike price ranges, and custom event markets with a written resolution clause. Each market shows its current odds as a price between $0.00 and $1.00.
3
Read who settles it, and when
Every market states its settlement authority and its expiry in its own on-chain description: protocol auto-settle from a price observation, a Hyperliquid validator vote, or a third-party deployer who signs the result. Check that tier before you size a position.
4
Place the order from your own wallet
Outcome tokens trade on a live spot order book, so you can use limit orders and exit before expiry at whatever the book will pay. Your position shares one account and one collateral balance with Hyperliquid perpetual futures.

Where the numbers live

Everything above is how the protocol works. For what it has actually done, including all-time and rolling-window volume, markets deployed and settled, the markets open right now with their current odds, and the live permissionless-deployment status, see the stats page. It is rebuilt from live exchange data and our own chain ingest every few minutes, and it publishes its methodology.

HIP-4 by the numbers

Volume, markets, settlements and permissionless status.

Open HIP-4 stats

Frequently asked questions

What is HIP-4 on Hyperliquid?

HIP-4 is Hyperliquid’s native prediction market protocol. It creates outcome tokens that trade as hash-prefixed coins on the HyperCore spot order book, alongside every other spot asset, sharing the same account and the same collateral as perpetual futures. A market is a question with a defined settlement moment; each side of the question is a tradable token whose price sits between $0.00 and $1.00 and reads as the market-implied probability.

How do HIP-4 prediction markets settle?

At the market’s expiry the winning side settles at $1.00 per share and the losing side at $0.00. Standalone outcomes can also settle to a fraction anywhere between $0 and $1 rather than a clean binary. Because the tokens trade on a live order book, you do not have to hold to expiry: you can sell into the book at any point before settlement at whatever price it will pay.

Who decides the outcome of a HIP-4 market?

One of three authorities, stated per market on-chain. Price markets auto-settle from an on-chain price observation at expiry, with no human decision in the path. Custom event markets are resolved by the Hyperliquid validator set voting on the outcome. Markets deployed permissionlessly from a validator-approved template are settled by the third party that deployed them. Those three carry genuinely different trust assumptions, which is why the settlement tier is worth checking before you trade.

Can anyone deploy a HIP-4 market?

Permissionless deployment is live on Hyperliquid testnet, where third parties can deploy markets from validator-approved templates. It is not live on Hyperliquid mainnet, and no mainnet date has been announced. On mainnet today, markets are deployed by the protocol. Press reporting from outlets including The Block, KuCoin and CoinGape puts the staking threshold for permissionless mainnet deployment at 500,000 HYPE; Hyperliquid’s own documentation does not publish a figure, so treat that number as reporting rather than protocol spec.

Is there a dispute period if a HIP-4 market settles wrongly?

No. There is no escrowed challenge window and no bonded dispute game. On a deployer-settled market the deployer signs the result and nobody can sign it in their place. What is documented is that the deployer’s stake stays locked while any of their outcomes is unsettled: deactivating as a deployer requires having no active outcomes and having met the minimum staking duration. That is the reason to look at who deployed a market, and at how many of their markets are currently sitting past their settlement moment with nothing signed, before taking the other side of it.

What is a HIP-4 template?

A template is a market blueprint approved by the Hyperliquid validator set. It fixes the question grammar and declares a list of keywords with the format each one must take, so a deployer supplies only the values, not the wording. That is what makes permissionless deployment safe enough to allow at all: a deployer cannot invent an arbitrary question, only instantiate an approved one. The live registry is readable from the chain and is rendered on this page.

What is the difference between HIP-3 and HIP-4?

They are different protocols that are easy to confuse. HIP-3 lets third parties deploy their own perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid, which is how the network lists perps on equities, commodities and indices. HIP-4 is the prediction market protocol: outcome tokens on the spot order book that settle to $1 or $0 at a defined moment. They connect at one point, which is that a HIP-3 perp can be the underlying a HIP-4 price market references.

Can I trade HIP-4 markets with leverage or hedge them?

HIP-4 outcome tokens are spot assets, and they share one Hyperliquid account and one collateral balance with perpetual futures. That shared collateral is what lets you run a perp against an outcome position rather than funding a second venue to hedge, and it is the main structural reason to trade prediction markets on a derivatives exchange.