都是誰在使用Trade.xyz交易？

Original title: "Who is actually trading on Trade.xyz?"

Original author: @web3_pastel, Arrakis Finance

Translation by: Jaleel, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

On the map of Hyperliquid, one of the most unavoidable names in 2026 is Trade.xyz. It was the first truly successful product to emerge after the launch of HIP-3, the "permissionless perpetual market deployment framework," bringing assets like US stocks, crude oil, and silver—traditionally limited to conventional trading hours—onto a 7×24 chain-based order book.

In just a few months, it grew from a niche experiment centered on the XYZ100 index into a chain-based trading venue hosting multiple markets (including oil, Tesla, and silver) with an average monthly trading volume exceeding $50 billion.

However, controversies surrounding it have also sparked significant discussion abroad: Among those impressive wallet numbers, how many are real users, and how many are sybils mass-created in anticipation of the yet-to-be-issued token?

Arrakis' research yields a rather interesting conclusion: A sybil layer indeed exists, with over thirty thousand wallets traceable to a single Polymarket account, "Themino"; but it inflates the user count, not the dollar volume. The real trading volume is driven by a few professional market-making desks, several taker bots originating from Bybit, and a long tail of retail traders heavily overlapping with Polymarket.

The full text is below:

Summary

When we wrote our first report, "Who is trading on HIP-3?", our attribution method was statistical. We classified wallets based on their trading behavior over the past three months: addresses predominantly placing limit orders were categorized as market makers, high-frequency taker addresses as arbitrageurs, and orders with low fill rates and builder tags as retail. This approach revealed some interesting market structure characteristics, but the classification was probabilistic, and approximately 70% of wallets remained unclassified.

This article replaces statistical inference with a deterministic classification method. Every order on @HyperliquidX carries a set of deterministic tags signed and published by the exchange itself: Time-in-Force (ALO, GTC, IOC, FrontendMarket), builder code, fill status, and position duration. We use these order metadata to classify each wallet into one of four categories: Retail, Market Maker, Arbitrage Bot, and Airdrop Hunter.

The second step is identifying the entities behind these categorized wallets, extracting identity and trading behavior data from the APIs of @arkham and HyperTracker. The top 450 wallets accounted for 78% of the total trading volume. Within this group, we identified several @Polymarket-linked accounts, @jump_, @SeliniCapital, @wintermute_t, Abraxas Capital, among others.

Through this two-step classification method, we observed several patterns. These are detailed below.

Trade.xyz Wallet Analysis

Our observation window was from March 10, 2026, to March 31, 2026, a total of 21 days. During this period, the four markets of @tradexyz (xyz:CL Crude Oil, xyz:SILVER Silver, xyz:TSLA Tesla, xyz:XYZ100) recorded 79,622 unique participating wallets and a total trading volume of $51.95 billion.

79,622 participating wallets broken down by trading volume. Although market makers represent less than 0.5% of the total wallets, they accounted for 63% of every dollar traded.

Classified by number of wallets (not trading volume). The Airdrop Hunter category alone comprises 35,091 wallets, almost half of the identified wallets.

The Airdrop Hunter category was one of the largest by wallet count but the smallest by volume share. These 35,091 wallets represented 44.07% of the total wallets but generated only $400 million in trading volume during the entire window, a mere 0.77% of the venue's total $51.95 billion. Nearly half of the active wallets on Trade.xyz contributed less than 1% of the total volume.

Breaking it down by market reveals another stark pattern.

Wallet distribution by market. xyz:CL absorbed 99.3% of the airdrop hunter wallets due to its optimal execution costs.

Of the 35,091 airdrop hunter wallets, 34,859 (99.3%) traded xyz:CL during the window, with the remaining 232 scattered across xyz:SILVER, xyz:TSLA, and xyz:XYZ100. This pattern aligns with typical airdrop hunter behavior: each wallet repeatedly executes small, two-sided trades to generate volume without taking on price risk. This strategy relies on tight execution costs and is extremely sensitive to slippage. xyz:CL, having the deepest liquidity among Trade.xyz's four markets, naturally became the preferred venue for such activity.

Another noteworthy phenomenon is the entity behind these addresses. On-chain tracing, detailed later, shows that 34,553 airdrop hunter wallets are linked to a single Polymarket operator. This one entity alone accounted for 43.4% of all participating wallets on Trade.xyz during this window.

At the other end of the classification lies market making. 363 wallets, representing 0.46% of active addresses, drove $32.75 billion in trading volume during the window—63% of every dollar on Trade.xyz. The remaining three categories fall in between. 522 SAT/HFT bots contributed $3.5 billion (6.7%). 38,307 wallets classified as retail contributed $8.7 billion (16.7%). 5,339 unclassified wallets contributed $6.61 billion (12.7%).

The 12.7% volume in the unclassified category cannot be qualitatively attributed to a specific strategy based solely on metadata. A reasonable guess is that a significant portion comes from retail traders placing limit orders via the Hyperliquid frontend or market/limit orders via the Trade.xyz frontend. Neither channel attaches explicit builder codes or specialized TIF tags to orders, making these trades invisible to metadata-driven classification.

Time-in-force distribution weighted by order count for each category. Unsurprisingly, 98.5% of market maker orders are ALO, while arbitrage bots use 100% IOC. The unclassified category shows 71.5% GTC orders, a hallmark of manual limit order placement by frontend users.

The TIF composition supports this hypothesis: 71.5% of orders in the unclassified category have a GTC (Good Till Cancel) time-in-force tag, typically used when frontend users place resting limit orders.

"Themino," Uncovering Over 30,000 Wallets

Over the past few weeks, there has been much debate in the market: Was Trade.xyz's impressive user count driven by genuine human participation or inflated by airdrop hunter activity ahead of the anticipated TGE? We do not intend to comment on the broader landscape of airdrop farming on this exchange, but our analysis of order-level data for the four Trade.xyz markets in March does reveal a pattern worth presenting.

Analyst Jascha pointed out that 92.5% of XYZ addresses had never traded on any other HIP-3 deployer.

Of the 34,602 wallets classified as airdrop hunters, 34,553—or 99.9%—can be traced back to a single Polymarket identity named "Themino."

"Themino," a Polymarket identity on Arbitrum, spawned 70 independent linear chains covering 34,553 wallets.

How did it work? Hyperliquid's L1 offers a primitive called `internalTransfer` that allows moving USDC between wallets for a fixed fee of $1, regardless of amount. The operator of Themino used this primitive to pass a single seed deposit sequentially through tens of thousands of new wallets. Each wallet would perform the same five-step routine in approximately 26 seconds:

1. Receive $X from the previous airdrop wallet via `internalTransfer`, losing $1 to the HL transfer fee.

2. Transfer $14 to its xyz sub-account.

3. Execute two IOC orders on xyz:CL (one buy, one sell), generating two fills and some volume.

4. Transfer approximately $13.99 back to the main account (the $0.01 difference being a buffer for execution slippage and trading fees).

5. Transfer $X minus $1 via `internalTransfer` to the next airdrop wallet.

The next wallet then repeats the same routine.

The 34,510 internal transfers in this operation cost Themino a total of $34,510 in protocol fees, a strategy consistent with his trading history on Polymarket.

Themino also bet "No" on Polymarket for "Will the US launch a strike on Iran before February 28, 2026?", losing roughly $80,000. The strike occurred on February 28.

What Are the Different Types of Builders?

Hyperliquid attaches an identifier to orders routed through third-party frontends, allowing these applications to collect custom frontend fees. This identifier is the builder code, providing the most direct evidence of which interface a wallet used (if any). For wallets trading across the four markets, these builders can generally be grouped into three types.

**Algorithmic Builders.** These are products designed for retail users to maximize trading volume on DEXs to farm potential airdrops. Before late 2025, farming on perpetual DEXs meant either wash trading or algorithmically running non-directional taker-vs-taker strategies, which were costly for participants and net-negative for the exchange. Retail market-making robots like @tread_fi, @PlanemoTrading, and @origamitech_ replaced wash trading with genuine value-adding market making. Every order from these products is post-only, meaning the wallet adds liquidity to the order book instead of consuming it.

As stated by @davidyjeong, CEO of @tread_fi: "Before retail market-making solutions, farming on perpetual DEXs meant wash trading, inflating volume at the cost of execution fees, slippage, and the risk of account bans. We solved this with a new farming method: the robot places maker orders on both sides. Users farm at a lower cost, often even profiting from the captured spread. The byproduct is that the market gets genuine top-of-book liquidity, which is exactly what HIP-3 equity perpetuals need during nights and weekends when traditional market makers are unwilling to participate. It's a better way to farm and a key reason why HIP-3 markets have excellent execution today."

The contribution of these market-making robots is most evident during periods when traditional market makers are absent. CME WTI futures close on Friday afternoon and don't reopen until Sunday evening; equity perpetuals face the same "night and weekend" gap. During these times, retail market-making robots support the top-of-book for markets like xyz:CL and xyz:TSLA.

It's important to note: In this analysis, wallets routed through these algorithmic products are classified as airdrop hunters. However, their trading behavior and impact on the market are structurally completely different from sybil activity.

**Wallet-Embedded Builders** are perpetual contract interfaces embedded within consumer wallets. Since early 2026, this type of integration has become one of the largest sources of retail order flow on HIP-3. This group includes @phantom, @MetaMask, @Rabby_io, @rainbowdotme, and @OneKeyHQ. Their median trading volume per wallet ranges from $1,000 to $3,000, consistent with the order size of retail traders who prioritize ease of use over marginal builder fees.

**Application Builders** are standalone perpetual frontends and integrated products: offerings designed for traders that provide specialized workflows, serving users who find wallet plugins insufficient and need better tools for order placement, charting, position management, and execution. This group has fewer wallets than the wallet-embedded type but higher volume per wallet, consistent with a more advanced user base that values functional depth over plug-and-play ease. These products include the @InsilicoTrading terminal, @liquidtrading, @hypurrdash, @BasedOneX, @Dreamcash, @infinex, @pear_protocol, @defiapp, and @pvp_dot_trade.

@0xVKTR, Head of Growth at @InsilicoTrading (the team behind the Insilico terminal), describes it this way: "At Insilico, we view HIP-3 markets as the next step in making real-world exposure native to the crypto ecosystem. Traders want more than just another frontend. They want fast execution, clean market access, and the ability to seamlessly switch between crypto and macro assets without leaving their existing workflow. Trade.xyz is one of the clearest examples of this demand. The order flow routed through Insilico proves that when a trading venue has depth, the product is useful, and the experience is built for serious participants, there is a genuine base of advanced users for chain-based perpetuals."

Who is Trade.xyz's Largest Market Maker?

The market-making landscape across Trade.xyz markets is highly concentrated. The top 5 market makers accounted for 50% of the market-making volume, the top 13 for 80%, and the top 21 for 90%. A handful of market-making desks underpin the vast majority of this exchange's market-making book.

Cumulative share of market-making volume ranked by wallet. The top 5 desks account for 50% of all market-making flow, the top 13 for 80%, and the top 21 for 90%.

The second-largest market maker is the most interesting wallet in the entire sample. 0xc926