HIP-4: Hyperliquid prediction markets, without the hand-waving.

What is HIP-4?

HIP-4 adds outcome contracts to Hyperliquid. Unlike a perpetual future, an outcome contract has a defined resolution condition and an expiry. It is nonlinear: the payout does not keep rising or falling with the underlying price. It resolves to a fixed amount when the stated condition is decided.

That makes HIP-4 useful for binary prediction markets, multi-outcome questions, price ranges, recurring crypto markets, and bounded options-like instruments. The contracts trade on HyperCore's central limit order book rather than in a separate automated market maker.

How HIP-4 trading works

Each outcome has two tradeable sides, normally Yes and No. Traders place limit or marketable orders against a live order book. A complete Yes/No set has a fixed gross value of 1 at ordinary binary settlement. Before settlement, however, executable bids and asks at a chosen size need not add to exactly 1.0 because each book has spread, depth, and inventory.

The engine can mint a complete pair when complementary orders cross. This is why an outcome market does not need a pre-minted seller for every share. Positions and fills remain on HyperCore, and market data arrives through the same general API and WebSocket surfaces builders already use for other Hyperliquid markets.

Hyperliquid's official Asset IDs reference defines an outcome encoding as 10 × outcome + side. That value appears as a #N API/WebSocket coin, a +N token name, or the integer order asset ID 100,000,000 + N.

Price is a probability signal, not a promise

A Yes share at 0.72 is a market price. Traders often interpret it as roughly a 72% probability, but the number also reflects liquidity, spreads, fees, inventory, and risk appetite. Thin markets can be wrong. Purrdict shows both sides and the order book so the quoted probability can be evaluated rather than taken on faith.

HIP-4 market types

“HIP-4 market” is an umbrella term. The live protocol data contains several shapes, and treating all of them as simple Yes/No questions loses important information.

Purrdict's open-source HIP-4 TypeScript SDK classifies these shapes, maps Hyperliquid's outcome identifiers to tradeable coins, computes tick sizes, and builds order payloads without adding runtime dependencies.

Settlement is automatic

When a binary market resolves, trading stops and resting orders are cancelled. The winning side records a settlement fill at 1 per share and the losing side records 0. Current quote-token metadata labels active mainnet markets in USDC, and current settlement fills credit USDC automatically. Legacy testnet fixtures may still expose USDH, so integrations should read the live asset metadata instead of hard-coding a token across networks. There is no separate claim button.

For recurring price markets, the resolution details include the oracle price used at expiry. For event markets, the resolution source and wording matter just as much as the final side. Traders should read the market's exact rules before treating its title as the entire contract.

Can you launch your own HIP-4 market?

Yes on the current template-based permissionless testnet path. A deployer uses a wallet in Standard mode, stakes 100 HYPE, activates a short venue name once, and signs a deployment action built from a validator-approved template. Purrdict's HIP-4 Launchpad guides that process without asking for a private key or using a server-side signer.

The venue name is permanent and globally unique. Current testnet rules limit active outcomes and daily deployments, while template fields constrain what can be created. Permissionless does not mean arbitrary contract text can bypass protocol rules.

Read the complete market-launch guide for the activation flow, template fields, limits, settlement responsibilities, and exact status.

What Purrdict adds to HIP-4

HIP-4 is the protocol primitive. Purrdict is an independent trading and creation interface built on it. The app discovers and classifies outcome markets, streams order books, handles wallet and agent-key signing, and presents settlement-aware portfolio data.

Purrdict also builds product layers that do not exist as native HIP-4 order books: prediction-market parlays and combos priced through competitive RFQs, a pooled market-making vault that can back those parlays, a permissionless Launchpad, and developer components and data APIs.

Purrdict is not Hyperliquid and is not presented as the official HIP-4 frontend. That independence lets the product experiment at the application layer while keeping standard HIP-4 markets on HyperCore.

Sources and methodology

This guide is maintained from primary documentation plus Purrdict's direct observation of public Hyperliquid APIs, WebSocket messages, signed deployer actions, fills, and L1 records. Product status is stated separately for mainnet and testnet.

• Hyperliquid Asset IDs — official outcome encoding and identifier forms.
• Hyperliquid Info endpoint — official market and account-data interface.
• hip4.fun protocol reference — Purrdict's independent, versioned map of observed mechanics.
• Purrdict HIP-4 market dataset — original indexed activity with methodology and JSON distribution.

HIP-4 frequently asked questions