Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Earlier this month, Trade.xyz officially completed the deployment of its prediction market product on the Hyperliquid mainnet, becoming the third HIP-4 prediction market project in the Hyperliquid ecosystem after Outcome.xyz and Skew Markets.
During its first few days of operation, Trade.xyz quietly launched 34 prediction events through the "Predict" subpage on its official website, covering Finance, Sports, and Others. However, perhaps because there had been no formal announcement, the cumulative trading volume and user count were not particularly high — only $180,000 in total trading volume in the first week, with just 263 users.
This morning, Trade.xyz officially began promoting the product through official channels for the first time.
According to the latest announcement, Trade.xyz has named the product Events. Events will cover sports, politics, economics, and financial markets, and will continue to expand into more categories and contract forms in the future. The first batch of events related to stocks, commodities, and Pre-IPO targets will rely on the depth and liquidity of Trade.xyz perpetual contracts on HIP-3, thereby ensuring that each contract is based on the real prices of Trade.xyz's highly liquid markets rather than relying on external oracles.
Through Events, Trade.xyz hopes to further advance the vision of building Hyperliquid into a "universal exchange" — constructing a unified and composable system for trading financial assets as well as real-world event outcomes.
More importantly, Trade.xyz has also officially added the design details of Events to its product documentation, especially clarifying the fee-related standards. Through these standards, we will be able to objectively compare the fee situation of Trade.xyz and Polymarket, and see which one is actually cheaper.
Fee Comparison: Trade.xyz vs Polymarket
First, let's look at the fee logic of both.
Trade.xyz's Events directly adopts Hyperliquid's Outcome Trading fee system. At present, the initial configuration does not charge additional project-side fees, and users only need to pay fees according to Hyperliquid's spot fee rates.
The base rates are Taker 0.07% and Maker 0.04%, and they are tiered based on the user's weighted trading volume over the past 14 days, with the highest tier reducing rates to Taker 0.025% and Maker 0; in addition, staking HYPE can also earn up to a 40% fee discount. It is worth noting that Events fees are not charged when opening a position, but rather when closing or final settlement, and Makers do not enjoy additional rebates.
- Odaily note: Events base tiered fee rates, as well as tiered fee rates after staking discounts (the chart only takes the highest Diamond level).
- Odaily note: Events staking fee discounts.
Polymarket's logic is clearly different: Makers are exempt from fees and enjoy rebates ranging from 15% to 25%, while Taker fees are dynamically calculated based on the market category and the probability price at the time the order is executed.
- Odaily note: Polymarket's fee parameters for different markets.
Currently, the fee parameter for Crypto markets on Polymarket is 0.07%, for Sports, Economics, Culture, Weather and other categories it is 0.05%, for Finance, Politics, Mentions, Tech it is 0.04%, and Geopolitics is completely free.The specific fee is calculated as C × feeRate × p × (1-p), so even with the same 0.04% fee parameter, the actual fee paid will still change with the price.
- Odaily note: How Polymarket's fee curve changes at different probabilities.
It is precisely because of this that, under different circumstances, the actual trading fee difference between Trade.xyz and Polymarket can be quite dramatic.
Let's look at a most intuitive example first. Suppose a user trades a $100 event with a 50% probability as a Taker. On Trade.xyz, based on the base Taker fee rate of 0.07%, the fee is about $0.07; on Polymarket, if it is in the tier with a 0.04 fee parameter such as Finance or Politics, calculated as C × feeRate × p × (1-p), the fee is about $1; for tiers with a 0.05 parameter such as Sports, it is about $1.25, and for Crypto markets it reaches $1.75.That is to say, at the stage when the probability is closest to 50/50 and trading competition is most intense, Polymarket's actual fee may be 14 to 25 times that of Trade.xyz.
However, as the event outcome gradually becomes clearer, the gap between the two will quickly narrow. The reason is that Polymarket's fee is not simply charged according to transaction volume, but is linked to p × (1-p) in the formula — the closer the probability is to 50%, the higher the fee; the closer it is to 0% or 100%, the lower the fee.
For example, for the same $100 Finance or Politics Taker trade, when the event probability rises from 50% to 90%, Polymarket's fee will drop from about $1 to $0.36; if the probability further reaches 95%, the fee is about $0.19, and at 99% it is only about $0.04. This means that for events that are already close to a "certain outcome," Polymarket's dynamic fee mechanism can actually significantly reduce trading costs, and may even be lower than Trade.xyz's base Taker fee rate.
However, there is also a very important variable here: Maker trading. Trade.xyz's base Maker fee rate is 0.04%, while Polymarket charges no trading fee for Makers and even provides rebate rewards.For users who are accustomed to placing limit orders and waiting for the market to actively execute, Polymarket's cost advantage will be significantly amplified; conversely, for Taker users who need rapid execution and directly take order book liquidity, Trade.xyz still has a fairly obvious fee advantage in most intermediate probability ranges.
In addition, the fee conditions for different event categories also differ. For example, Geopolitics markets on Polymarket even completely, charge no trading fees, so one cannot simply use a fixed fee rate to judge whether Polymarket is cheap; the actual cost also depends on "what event is being traded" and "what the event's current probability is."
Overall, if users mainly participate in early-stage events with probabilities close to 50/50 and need to frequently actively take orders, Trade.xyz's low fixed fee advantage is very prominent; if they mainly trade geopolitical events and other tail events that are already highly skewed, or are accustomed to executing through Maker limit orders, Polymarket may have lower, or even close to zero, actual trading costs.
In other words, Trade.xyz's advantage lies in simple, stable, and low Taker costs, while Polymarket ties fees to market probability, forming a more complex dynamic fee system that may be cheaper in specific trading scenarios.
The scale gap is still huge, but the cross-industry leader cannot be ignored
That said, based on current data, Trade.xyz is clearly not yet qualified to compete head-on with Polymarket. In its first week, only $180,000 in trading volume and 263 users still represent a gap of several orders of magnitude compared with the liquidity, user scale, and market coverage that Polymarket has already established.At least at this stage, Trade.xyz is more like a challenger that has just entered the field, rather than a direct competitor to Polymarket.
But if we pull our view back a bit from the prediction market itself, Trade.xyz is not without opportunity. Over the past year or more, Trade.xyz has already proven its capabilities in market creation, liquidity organization, and long-tail asset trading within the Hyperliquid ecosystem through HIP-3, and Events can precisely extend these accumulated capabilities further into the prediction market.
Especially in terms of fees, liquidity, and the way it combines with Hyperliquid perpetual markets, Trade.xyz is not simply copying Polymarket, but attempting to incorporate the prediction market into Hyperliquid's unified trading system.If it can subsequently truly migrate the trading capabilities already established by HIP-3 to Events, and use Hyperliquid's users and liquidity to complete a cold start, then Trade.xyz may not be unable to become a disruptor in the prediction market track.
Of course, all of this currently remains at the potential stage. For prediction markets, low fees are only one competitive condition; what truly determines the market landscape is still liquidity, user scale, event coverage, and market formation capability. Whether Trade.xyz can replicate its advantages in HIP-3 to Events may be what is truly worth observing next.
