Trade.xyz Officially Enters Prediction Markets: Whose Fees Are Cheaper, Trade.xyz or Polymarket?

Original | Odaily (@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, following 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, cumulative trading volume and user numbers were not particularly impressive — only $180,000 in total trading volume and just 263 users in the first week.

This morning, Trade.xyz officially began promoting the product through its 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, with plans to continuously expand into more categories and contract types. The first batch of events related to stocks, commodities, and Pre-IPO targets will leverage the depth and liquidity of Trade.xyz's perpetual contracts on HIP-3, ensuring that every contract is based on real prices from Trade.xyz's highly liquid markets rather than relying on external oracles.

Through Events, Trade.xyz hopes to further advance its vision of building Hyperliquid into a "universal exchange" — creating a unified and composable system for trading financial assets as well as real-world event outcomes.

More importantly, Trade.xyz has also officially added design details for Events to its product documentation, particularly clarifying fee-related standards. Through these standards, we can objectively compare Trade.xyz's fees with Polymarket's to see which one is actually cheaper.

Fee Comparison: Trade.xyz vs Polymarket

Let's first look at the fee logic of both platforms.

Trade.xyz's Events directly adopts Hyperliquid's Outcome Trading fee structure. Currently, the initial configuration does not charge additional project fees, and users only need to pay fees according to Hyperliquid's spot rates.

The base rates are Taker 0.07% and Maker 0.04%, and these are tiered based on the user's weighted trading volume over the past 14 days, with rates going as low as Taker 0.025% and Maker 0. Additionally, staking HYPE can earn up to a 40% fee discount. It is worth noting that Events fees are not charged at the time of opening a position, but rather at closing or final settlement, and Makers do not receive additional rebates.

• Odaily note: Events base tiered rates, and tiered rates after staking discounts (only the highest Diamond tier is shown in the image).

• Odaily note: Events staking fee discounts.

Polymarket's logic is clearly different. Makers pay no 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 filled.

• Odaily note: Polymarket's fee parameters for different markets.

Currently, Polymarket's fee parameter for Crypto markets is 0.07%, while Sports, Economics, Culture, Weather, and other categories are 0.05%, Finance, Politics, Mentions, and Tech are 0.04%, and Geopolitics is completely free. Specific fees are 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: Changes in Polymarket's fee curve at different probabilities.

Because of this, under different circumstances, the actual trading fee difference between Trade.xyz and Polymarket can be quite significant.

Let's start with the most intuitive example. Suppose a user trades $100 on an event with a 50% probability as a Taker. On Trade.xyz, based on the base Taker rate of 0.07%, the fee would be approximately $0.07. On Polymarket, if it falls under the 0.04% fee parameter tier such as Finance or Politics, calculated as C × feeRate × p × (1-p), the fee would be approximately $1. For the 0.05% parameter tier such as Sports, it would be approximately $1.25, and for Crypto markets, it would reach $1.75. In other words, when the probability is closest to 50/50 and trading competition is most intense, Polymarket's actual fees can be 14 to 25 times those of Trade.xyz.

However, as the event outcome gradually becomes clearer, the gap between the two quickly narrows. The reason is that Polymarket's fees are not simply charged based on transaction amount, but are tied to p × (1-p) in the formula — the closer the probability is to 50%, the higher the fee; the closer 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 would drop from about $1 to $0.36. If the probability further reaches 95%, the fee would be about $0.19, and at 99%, it would be only about $0.04. This means that for events approaching 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 rate.

However, there is another very important variable here: Maker trades. Trade.xyz's base Maker rate is 0.04%, while Polymarket charges no trading fees for Makers and even provides rebate returns. For users who are accustomed to placing limit orders and waiting for the market to fill them, Polymarket's cost advantage becomes significantly amplified. Conversely, for Taker users who need rapid execution and directly consume order book liquidity, Trade.xyz still holds a considerable fee advantage across most mid-range probability scenarios.

Additionally, fee conditions vary across different event categories. For example, Geopolitics markets on Polymarket even charge no trading fees at all, so one cannot simply use a fixed rate to judge whether Polymarket is cheaper — the actual cost also depends on "what event is being traded" and "what the current probability of the event is."

Overall, if users mainly participate in early-stage events with probabilities close to 50/50 and need to frequently take orders aggressively, Trade.xyz's low fixed-rate advantage is very prominent. If users mainly trade geopolitical events and other highly skewed tail events, or are accustomed to filling orders through Maker limit orders, Polymarket may offer lower, or even near-zero, actual trading costs.

In other words, Trade.xyz's advantage lies in simple, stable, and low Taker costs, while Polymarket binds fees to market probability, forming a more complex dynamic fee system that may be cheaper in specific trading scenarios.

The Scale Gap Remains Huge, but the Crossover Leader Should Not Be Ignored

That said, based on current data, Trade.xyz is clearly not yet qualified to compete head-on with Polymarket. With only $180,000 in trading volume and 263 users in its first week, compared to the liquidity, user base, and market coverage Polymarket has already established, there is still a gap of several orders of magnitude. At least at this stage, Trade.xyz looks more like a newly entered challenger rather than a direct competitor to Polymarket.

But if we slightly zoom out from the prediction market itself, Trade.xyz is not entirely without opportunity. Over the past year or so, Trade.xyz has already proven itself in the Hyperliquid ecosystem through HIP-3 in terms of market creation, liquidity organization, and long-tail asset trading, and Events can precisely extend these accumulations further into the prediction market.

Especially in terms of fees, liquidity, and its combination with Hyperliquid's perpetual market, Trade.xyz is not simply copying a Polymarket, but attempting to integrate prediction markets into Hyperliquid's unified trading system. If it can truly migrate the trading capabilities already established through HIP-3 to Events and leverage Hyperliquid's users and liquidity to complete a cold start, then Trade.xyz may well become a disruptor in the prediction market sector.

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 on HIP-3 to Events is perhaps what is truly worth watching next.