Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 prediction market found its biggest success so far in World Cup trading.
The source article, written by David Christopher and translated by Saoirse for Foresight News, says that when HIP-4 first launched, the expectation was different. The early view was that Hyperliquid was not trying to go head-to-head with Polymarket or Kalshi. Instead, event markets looked more like an extension of Hyperliquid’s broader trading stack: binary contracts for daily crypto use, tools for hedging perpetual positions, a way to shape options-like exposure, and another method for keeping traders’ positions inside the Hyperliquid platform.
What followed took a different path. Hyperliquid went on to list markets tied to the NBA Finals, individual World Cup matches, and championship outcomes. Those three categories — with the latter two doing most of the heavy lifting — made up about 48% of HIP-4’s cumulative trading volume to date.
After the World Cup peak, open interest in those markets dropped by more than 90%. The article does not treat that as proof that HIP-4 has failed. Its point is narrower: the product currently lacks event contracts with enough natural draw to keep activity elevated once a major catalyst disappears.
That matters because HIP-4 is still running in a permissioned setup. Every market has to be manually created and listed by validators. Most of the remaining live markets are tied to crypto price direction, and the article describes their volume as weak compared with what sports events were able to generate.
Hyperliquid is now trying to remove that bottleneck. On July 31, permissionless HIP-4 deployment went live on testnet, opening the door for third-party teams to create and operate event markets on their own, while also spelling out the conditions they would need to meet.
Sports drove nearly half of HIP-4 volume
From May through August 2026, 47.8% of HIP-4 trading volume came from sports markets, according to the article. The World Cup accounted for most of that sports activity. That concentration shows how much the platform has relied on large, widely followed events to attract order flow.
Permissionless deployment still comes with structure
The article makes a clear distinction: permissionless deployment does not mean unrestricted market creation.
Under the preliminary mainnet design, validators would first approve market templates. Those templates act as reusable frameworks that define how a market can be created and how it will settle. A deployer would then select an approved template and use it to launch a specific market, filling in details such as the trading question, possible outcomes, expiry time, and the settlement standard.
The article uses politics as an example, and later explains why. If a binary event template is approved, it could be used to build a market around whether a candidate wins a race. But Hyperliquid has not disclosed the scope of those templates. It is still unclear whether one template could cover Senate, House, and governor contests, or whether separate templates would be needed for party control, seat totals, and multi-candidate races.
What is already clear is that deployers would not need to seek approval for each individual market. They would only need to use templates that validators had already signed off on.
The accountability model mirrors HIP-3. Deployers would have to define rules precisely and handle settlement correctly. If they make major mistakes, validators would have the authority to slash their staked assets.
The draft framework includes several key requirements:
- Deployers must stake 500,000 HYPE, the same standard used in HIP-3.
- The stake is locked for six months.
- They can withdraw that collateral only after all markets under their name have fully settled.
- At the start, each deployer can create up to 100 outcome slots.
- That capacity becomes reusable after markets settle.
- Hyperliquid plans to expand extra capacity later through an auction process.
- Deployers can ultimately earn up to 50% of the trading fees from the markets they create.
The next obvious opening is the U.S. midterm election
With the World Cup surge behind it, the article points to the U.S. midterms as the next major opening for HIP-4.
Political contracts were the original gateway for prediction markets into mainstream attention. Kalshi and Polymarket already offer developed election dashboards covering control of Congress, individual races, and seat totals. HIP-4, by contrast, has not listed any election-related markets yet.
The article cites Kalshi data showing that there were 92 days left until the U.S. midterm election, with markets assigning Republicans a 54% chance of controlling the Senate. Democrats currently hold 49 seats and Republicans 47, and 51 seats are enough to control the chamber. The accompanying state map marked the win probabilities for each party.
Mainnet timing may determine whether third parties can capture the election cycle
Whether outside deployers can fill that gap depends on when permissionless HIP-4 reaches mainnet.
The article compares the current rollout with HIP-3’s earlier path. In that case, 164 days passed between the first stripped-down permissionless testnet release and the mainnet launch. But once the initial mainnet specification was published and a mainnet bug bounty program opened, only 18 days passed before launch.
HIP-4 currently sits somewhere between those two points. Its preliminary mainnet architecture is already public, and deployment is already available on testnet, but there is still no mainnet-level bug bounty program. That leaves the timetable uncertain.
If the system goes live in time, deployers could build out a broader election trading section around the midterms instead of listing isolated race-by-race contracts. That still depends on validators approving templates that support election use cases.
If permissionless deployment misses the midterm window, validators could still manually list a range of election markets. HIP-4 could capture trading flow either way. The difference, as the article frames it, is that Hyperliquid would lose its first major chance to prove that external deployers can consistently supply timely, high-interest markets for the platform.
The World Cup already showed that Hyperliquid users are willing to trade around major real-world events. The sharp fall in activity after the tournament ended showed the other side of the story: without a major event, the platform struggles to sustain momentum.
That is why the article treats this midterm cycle as a live test for HIP-4. It could help the platform keep market activity alive, and it could also become the first serious proving ground for permissionless deployment if the rollout reaches mainnet in time.