What is HIP-3 on Hyperliquid?

HIP-3 (Builder-Deployed Perpetuals) is Hyperliquid's framework for permissionless perpetual market creation. Live on mainnet since October 13, 2025, it lets anyone who stakes 500,000 HYPE deploy their own perpetual markets on HyperCore — covering crypto, equities, commodities, indices, and forex. Deployers set parameters (leverage, oracle, fees), get their first 3 markets free, then bid in an auction for additional slots. Fees split 50/50 between the deployer and the protocol.

What is HIP-4 on Hyperliquid?

HIP-4 is Hyperliquid's outcome contract / prediction market framework. Announced in September 2025 and live on testnet since February 2, 2026, it introduces binary YES/NO contracts that settle at 0 or 1 in USDH (Hyperliquid's native stablecoin) based on real-world events. Contracts are fully collateralized at 1x (no leverage) and share the same margin account as perps and spot. Mainnet rollout happens in two phases — curated canonical markets first, then permissionless builder deployment with a 1,000,000 HYPE stake requirement.

When did HIP-3 go live?

HIP-3 activated on Hyperliquid mainnet on October 13, 2025. The first non-crypto perpetual market under HIP-3 — a Tesla stock perp deployed by Felix Protocol — launched on November 13, 2025, demonstrating the framework's ability to expand beyond crypto assets.

When does HIP-4 launch on mainnet?

As of April 2026, no specific HIP-4 mainnet date has been confirmed. Hyperliquid has said mainnet launch will happen 'within 2026'. The rollout is two-phase: first, a curated set of canonical prediction markets chosen by the Hyperliquid team; second, permissionless deployment opened to any builder staking 1,000,000 HYPE. HIP-4 has been live on testnet since February 2, 2026.

How much does it cost to deploy a HIP-3 perp market?

A deployer must stake 500,000 HYPE. Once qualified, the first 3 markets are deployed free. Any additional markets are allocated via a bidding auction — deployers pay to secure a slot. Deployers then earn 50% of trading fees generated by their markets, with the other 50% accruing to the protocol (and ultimately HLP and HYPE holders).

What are the risks of HIP-3 for HLP depositors?

HIP-3 markets are permissionless, meaning new and potentially thinly-traded markets can launch without Hyperliquid team curation. This reintroduces the tail-risk profile that caused the JELLY and FARTCOIN events — a whale opens a concentrated position in a thin market, cascading liquidations hit HLP. HIP-3 includes deployer slashing as a safeguard, but the basic structural risk remains: more markets means more surfaces where tail events can occur.

Is HIP-4 like Polymarket or Kalshi?

Conceptually yes — binary YES/NO contracts on real-world events. Mechanically different: HIP-4 contracts live inside Hyperliquid's orderbook and margin system, settle in USDH, and share collateral with perp/spot positions. Polymarket runs on Polygon with its own AMM and USDC settlement; Kalshi is a regulated TradFi venue. A trader can hold HL perps, HL spot, and HIP-4 outcome contracts in a single margin account — that's the structural differentiator.

How does HIP-3 change Hyperliquid vault strategies?

Three shifts. (1) More markets means more strategy surface for leader vaults — funding capture, basis trades, and market-making can extend into stocks, commodities, and forex. (2) Vault leaders can deploy their own HIP-3 markets if they stake the HYPE, aligning market creation with vault strategy. (3) Thin new markets create both alpha opportunities and drawdown risk; VaultVision's risk score weights exposure to thin-liquidity markets going forward.

Will HIP-4 prediction markets affect vault APR?

Not directly until mainnet. Once HIP-4 is live, two things can happen: (1) new vault strategies specialising in prediction-market arbitrage (e.g., hedging event risk across outcome contracts and perps) will emerge, and (2) HLP may take a share of outcome-contract trading fees the same way it shares perp fees today. Neither is priced in yet because HIP-4 is testnet-only as of April 2026.

HIP-3 & HIP-4 Explained

Permissionless perps (live) and prediction markets (testnet) unpacked — how they work, what they cost, what's actually running, and what they mean for Hyperliquid vault depositors.

April 20, 2026 11 min read by @0xkayser

TL;DR. HIP-3 made perp-market creation permissionless — anyone staking 500K HYPE can spin up a new market (crypto, stocks, commodities, forex). Live on mainnet since October 2025, ~6 months in. HIP-4 adds prediction markets — binary 0/1 outcome contracts sharing a margin account with perps and spot. Live on testnet since February 2026, mainnet "within 2026" with a 2-phase rollout. Together they're turning Hyperliquid into an everything exchange, and that changes the risk surface for HLP and leader vaults.

In this explainer

HIP-3 vs HIP-4 at a glance
HIP-3: builder-deployed perpetuals
How HIP-3 works (500K stake, auction, 50/50 fees)
What's live 6 months in
What HIP-3 means for vaults
HIP-4: outcome contracts / prediction markets
How HIP-4 works (0/1 settlement, USDH, unified margin)
HIP-4 vs Polymarket vs Kalshi
What HIP-4 means for vaults
The everything exchange thesis
What to watch if you deposit into vaults
FAQ

HIP-3 vs HIP-4 at a glance

	HIP-3	HIP-4
What it is	Permissionless perpetual markets	Binary outcome / prediction contracts
Status	Live on mainnet (Oct 13, 2025)	Testnet (Feb 2, 2026). Mainnet: within 2026.
Deployer stake	500,000 HYPE	1,000,000 HYPE (phase 2)
Leverage	Deployer-set per market	None — 1x fully collateralized
Settlement	USDC (mark-to-market PnL)	USDH (settles to 0 or 1 at expiry)
Fee split	50% deployer / 50% protocol	TBD (will mirror HIP-3 structure)
Margin	Shared with other HL perps	Shared with perps and spot
Asset types	Crypto, stocks, commodities, forex, indices	Real-world events (price, election, weather, etc.)

HIP-3: Builder-deployed perpetuals Live

HIP-3 is the protocol change that turned Hyperliquid from a curated-listing venue into a permissionless perp factory. Before HIP-3, only the Hyperliquid team could list new perp markets. After HIP-3, any user who meets the stake and quality bar can launch a market and earn half the trading fees on it.

The practical effect over the first 6 months: Hyperliquid stopped being a "crypto perp DEX" and started being a general-purpose derivatives L1. Felix Protocol launched the first non-crypto perp market — a Tesla stock perp — on November 13, 2025. That list has since expanded across equities, commodities, FX, and long-tail crypto that would never have made a curated list.

How HIP-3 works, in plain English

Stake. The deployer locks up 500,000 HYPE. At April 2026 HYPE prices, that's a serious commitment — the stake is real skin in the game, not a formality.
Deploy. The first 3 markets are free. The deployer sets the parameters: oracle, leverage cap, funding formula, initial margin, liquidation schedule. They can run perps on literally any asset with a resolvable oracle.
Auction. Additional markets beyond the first 3 go through an on-chain auction. Deployers bid for slots; popular deployers pay more for premium listings.
Earn. 50% of all trading fees on the deployed markets flow to the deployer. The other 50% accrues to the protocol (HLP + HYPE holders).
Slash. If the deployer misbehaves — bad oracle, downtime, parameter exploit — validators can slash up to the full stake. Deployer risk is real.

Key insight: HIP-3 fees don't replace HLP's income stream, they extend it. Every HIP-3 market funnels half its fees into the same bucket that feeds HLP's base yield. More markets → more fees → more HLP APR (all else equal).

What's actually live, 6 months in

HIP-3 has moved faster than most protocol upgrades. A non-exhaustive map of what's trading:

Stock perps. Tesla (first, Nov 2025), followed by NVDA, AAPL, and a handful of other large-caps — all deployed by third-party builders, not the HL team.
Long-tail crypto. Dozens of new altcoin perps that wouldn't have been listed under the old curation regime. Some have traction, most don't.
Commodities + FX. Gold, oil, and major FX pairs showing up on specialised deployer shelves.
Index-style baskets. A few "sector" perps (e.g., "top-10 AI stocks" composite) started appearing in Q1 2026.

Not every HIP-3 market has real liquidity. Many are deployer vanity launches with zero volume. The pattern is the same as listing on any open marketplace — a handful of deployers drive most of the volume, the rest is long-tail noise.

What HIP-3 means for Hyperliquid vaults

Three structural shifts for vault depositors:

1. More strategy surface for leader vaults. Market-making, funding capture, and basis trades previously limited to ~100 curated perps can now reach across stocks, commodities, and FX. Leader vaults that specialised in one narrow crypto strategy now have a wider menu. Expect a new generation of multi-asset leader vaults in 2026.

2. Thin-liquidity tail risk is back. The JELLY and FARTCOIN incidents happened on a curated listing set. A permissionless market can be significantly thinner. HIP-3 includes deployer slashing as a safeguard, but a whale attacking a low-liquidity book is still a cascade risk to HLP. We expect more JELLY-style events per year now — smaller individually, more frequent.

3. Leader vaults can deploy their own markets. A vault running a specific strategy (e.g., "gold basis") can now deploy the exact perp it needs to run that strategy, rather than waiting for HL curation. Some of the most interesting leader vaults in Q1 2026 are doing exactly this — deploying HIP-3 markets that match their edge.

What we track on VaultVision: which leader vaults have exposure to HIP-3 markets with <$500K daily volume. That's the single best proxy for HIP-3-driven drawdown risk. Our risk score now weights thin-market concentration more heavily post-HIP-3.

HIP-4: Outcome contracts / prediction markets Testnet

HIP-4 is the next big protocol extension: native prediction markets, live on testnet since February 2, 2026, and scheduled for mainnet "within 2026". The thesis is that binary outcome contracts — YES / NO bets on real-world events — are the third major derivative class after perps and spot, and they should live in the same margin account as everything else a trader holds.

This is the move that takes Hyperliquid from "perp DEX + spot" to "everything exchange": a single venue where you can hold a BTC perp, USDC spot, HYPE position, and a 2026 election contract, all cross-margined.

How HIP-4 works

Binary contracts. Each market is a YES/NO contract on a specific resolvable event. "BTC > $200K by end of Q2 2026", for example. The contract settles to either 1 (YES happened) or 0 (it didn't).
Bounded trading range. Before resolution, the contract trades between 0 and 1. A price of 0.62 on the YES side means the market implies ~62% probability.
Fully collateralised at 1x. No leverage. You post the full notional upfront. Max loss per contract is your stake; max gain is the complementary amount. This is why HIP-4 positions can share margin with leveraged perps safely — they can't blow up the whole account.
USDH settlement. HIP-4 contracts settle in USDH, Hyperliquid's native stablecoin. This is Hyperliquid deliberately routing prediction-market volume through USDH to bootstrap native stablecoin liquidity.
Unified margin. For the first time on HL, a trader can hold perps + spot + prediction contracts in a single cross-margined account. Natural offsetting is possible — e.g., you're short ETH perps and long a "ETH finishes H1 above $5K" contract, and the margin engine understands the correlation.

Resolution mechanism. Each market has a defined resolution process described at deployment — typically a committee of resolvers, an oracle feed, or a defined data source. At expiry, the market settles to 0 or 1 based on that process. Disputes go through a predefined challenge window before final settlement.

HIP-4 vs Polymarket vs Kalshi

	HIP-4	Polymarket	Kalshi
Venue	Hyperliquid L1 orderbook	Polygon AMM	Regulated CFTC exchange
Settlement	USDH	USDC	USD (fiat rails)
Matching	Central limit orderbook	AMM + orderbook hybrid	CLOB
Margin with other assets	Yes — shared account	No	No
KYC	None	Light	Full
Leverage on adjacent positions	Yes (via perps in same account)	No	No

The structural differentiator isn't "prediction markets on a DEX" — Polymarket already did that. It's shared margin with perps and spot. Nobody else has that. That's what makes HIP-4 interesting for professional traders and, downstream, for vault strategies.

What HIP-4 means for Hyperliquid vaults

Not much yet — mainnet isn't live. Once it is, expect:

New vault categories. Prediction-market arbitrage vaults, event-hedging vaults, correlation-harvesting vaults that trade HIP-4 against perps.
HLP income extension. HIP-4 trading fees will likely flow through the same HLP share mechanism as HIP-3, adding a new fee stream to HLP's base yield.
Risk management changes. Unified margin is powerful but also means a bad prediction-market position can, in principle, affect margin on a perp position in the same account. HLP's risk model will need to treat cross-asset margin as a first-class thing.
Selection risk for HIP-4 leader vaults. Prediction-market alpha is different from perp alpha. Leaders with 3-year basis-trading track records have zero track record on event contracts. Don't trust track-record transfer across asset classes.

The everything exchange thesis

Zoom out. HIP-3 + HIP-4 together turn Hyperliquid into something that doesn't really exist elsewhere in DeFi: a single L1 where perps, spot, equities, commodities, FX, and prediction markets all share an orderbook, a margin system, and a liquidity pool (HLP).

The strategic move is clear: every dollar of fee revenue on any of those asset classes ends up routed through the same HYPE-aligned fee structure. Deployers, HLP, and HYPE holders all compound on the breadth. The more asset classes live on HL, the more sticky the liquidity becomes, and the harder it is for a single-asset-class competitor to catch up.

For depositors, the thesis is: HLP's APR has multiple compounding new income streams in 2026 — HIP-3 perp fees, HIP-4 outcome-contract fees — on top of the existing orderbook and liquidation PnL. That's the bull case. The bear case is that permissionless markets add tail-risk surface faster than the risk-management tooling can keep up, and we see more JELLY-like drawdowns before the parameter tuning catches up.

What to watch if you deposit into vaults

HIP-3 market concentration. How much of HLP's PnL is now tied to thin new HIP-3 markets? If the share rises above ~15-20% of total PnL variance, HLP's drawdown profile changes meaningfully.
Deployer slashing events. If a deployer gets slashed, it's a signal the safeguards are working — but also that someone was adversarial. Track slashing frequency as an ecosystem-health metric.
HIP-4 mainnet date. Once announced, expect a pre-launch HYPE run. Don't size up leader-vault deposits based on "HIP-4 will pump APR" — wait for actual fee data.
USDH liquidity. HIP-4's settlement rail is USDH. USDH depegs or liquidity collapse would cascade into HIP-4 vaults; watch the USDH/USDC peg and HL's USDH reserves.
Leader vault drift. Leaders who pivoted from crypto perps to HIP-3 stock perps are running different strategies now, even if the vault name didn't change. Don't trust a pre-HIP-3 90-day track record as predictive for a post-pivot vault.

Track HIP-3 market exposure on VaultVision

Every active Hyperliquid leader vault, with live risk score, thin-market concentration, and drawdown profile. Our risk model now weights HIP-3 exposure explicitly.

Open VaultVision

FAQ

What is HIP-3 in one sentence?

Permissionless perpetual market creation on Hyperliquid — anyone who stakes 500K HYPE can deploy their own perp market on any asset with a resolvable oracle.

What is HIP-4 in one sentence?

Native binary prediction markets on Hyperliquid — YES/NO contracts on real-world events that settle 0 or 1, fully collateralised, and share a margin account with perps and spot.

Is HIP-3 risky for HLP depositors?

Slightly riskier than pre-HIP-3 HL. Permissionless markets = more surfaces for tail events. HLP's drawdown profile now includes some exposure to thin HIP-3 markets. Still overall the safest vault on HL in our view, but not zero-risk.

When will HIP-4 launch on mainnet?

"Within 2026" — no specific date confirmed as of April 2026. Two-phase rollout: canonical team-curated markets first, permissionless deployment (1M HYPE stake) second.

Can I trade HIP-4 outcome contracts today?

Only on testnet. Mainnet is pending. If you want to experiment, Hyperliquid's testnet has BTC and HYPE binary markets live.

Does HIP-3 reduce HLP's JELLY-style tail risk?

No — arguably increases it slightly, because permissionless means less curation. The mitigation is deployer slashing plus OI limits, not the absence of the risk category.

Are HIP-3 stock perps legal?

They exist on a permissionless protocol with no KYC. Whether trading them is legal depends on your jurisdiction. HL doesn't advise. This is the same trade-off as every other HL product: more freedom, zero regulatory backstop.

Will HIP-3 and HIP-4 pump HYPE?

Depends on adoption. HIP-3 generated a small but real HYPE rally on launch; HIP-4 produced a 10-14% move on the announcement. More protocol fee revenue → more HYPE accrual. We don't do price predictions, but the mechanism is clearly HYPE-accretive if volume materialises.