$3 Trillion Perp Market Welcomes New Players: Prediction Market Giants Target Hyperliquid

The two platforms belong to different capital systems and user bases. Polymarket is backed by Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley venture capital, while Kalshi just completed a new round of funding in March with a valuation of $22 billion. Their usual competitive relationship is not particularly harmonious. However, when the same external threat emerged, they almost simultaneously took the same defensive action.

Polymarket’s product went live on the day of the announcement, initially supporting BTC, NVDA, and gold with up to 10x leverage. Kalshi will officially launch on April 27 under the brand name “Timeless,” leveraging its CFTC DCM license and the new margin trading permission obtained in March. Both are playing the same card: licensed compliance + native prediction market user base.

“Vertical Competition”

From early 2024 to March 2026, the monthly trading volume growth curves for Kalshi and Polymarket are almost vertical.

Kalshi’s monthly trading volume was about $100 million in January 2024. By March 2025, this number had risen to $521 million. In October 2025, $4.4 billion. In March 2026, over $10.4 billion. In just over two years, it grew by more than 100 times.

Polymarket’s pace is different but equally dramatic. During the US presidential election in November 2024, its single-month trading volume surged to about $1.9 billion. It declined after the election, but the platform subsequently found sustained vitality. In February 2026, Polymarket’s monthly trading volume reached $7 billion (according to The Block), and about $8 billion in March. It is worth noting that Paradigm’s report in December 2025 pointed out that Polymarket has an issue with double-counting trading volume, so the above figures should be considered with corresponding uncertainty.

The combined peak for the two platforms occurred in February 2026, with a total monthly trading volume of approximately $16.8 billion.

This set of data gives Polymarket and Kalshi the confidence to enter the perpetual contracts market. Users have demand for such financial instruments, and the platforms have the ability to maintain liquidity and user stickiness. This is a starting point that is difficult for any new entrant into the perpetual contracts market to replicate.

The problem is, the time window is narrowing. The perpetual contract products of the two platforms have some interesting differences in key dimensions.

Polymarket is taking the kripto-native route. With 10x leverage and initial support for BTC, NVDA, and gold, it directly targets competitors like Coinbase and Hyperliquid. In terms of user structure, Polymarket’s core users are kripto-native and are no strangers to perpetual contracts, resulting in low migration costs.

Kalshi is playing a card more focused on compliance channels. It has already integrated with Robinhood, whose user base consists of US retail investors accustomed to traditional financial products, not crypto users operating on-chain daily. Kalshi’s valuation has reached $22 billion, higher than Polymarket’s $9 billion. Behind the higher valuation are higher market expectations, requiring access to a market larger than the existing prediction market.

Both platforms hold the CFTC’s DCM (Designated Contract Pasar) license, a key qualification for legally offering leveraged derivatives within the United States. Compared to offshore exchanges, this license is their core barrier for serving US users. Kalshi additionally obtained margin trading permission in March of this year, making its regulatory conditions more complete.

Is Hyperliquid the Real Rival?

Throughout 2025, the total trading volume of the entire global prediction market was approximately $50.25 billion. This number seems significant, but in the perpetual contracts market, it’s just background noise. Binance’s annual perpetual contracts trading volume alone is $25.09 trillion, Bybit’s is $9.43 trillion, and even the on-chain DEX Hyperliquid reached $3 trillion in 2025. The combined total of these three is about $37.5 trillion, which is 750 times the size of the entire prediction market.

It’s not that the prediction market is weak; it’s that the two markets are currently not on the same scale. The market Polymarket and Kalshi are entering is three orders of magnitude larger than their existing main business.

Another detail better illustrates the point. Hyperliquid’s average daily trading volume is about $8.2 billion, equivalent to 80% of Kalshi’s entire March 2026 prediction market trading volume. In other words, Hyperliquid’s daily volume nearly matches Kalshi’s prediction market monthly volume.

They are well aware of this scale difference. Their choice to enter perpetual contracts is not because they are confident in directly challenging Binance, but because something else is happening.

Hyperliquid became the largest on-chain perpetual contracts DEX in 2025 with a trading volume of $3 trillion, holding about 38% market share in the decentralized derivatives space, once exceeding 70% earlier in the year. This achievement has already put pressure on centralized exchanges. But what makes prediction markets nervous is something else Hyperliquid is doing.

HIP-4, a protocol proposal from Hyperliquid, aims to allow anyone to issue perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, including contracts based on prediction market events such as election results, sports scores, and macroeconomic data. This directly targets the core user needs of Kalshi and Polymarket.

Numerically, the gap is evident. Hyperliquid’s average daily trading volume is about $8.2 billion, while Kalshi’s prediction market average daily volume is about $350 million, and Polymarket’s is about $270 million. Hyperliquid’s size is roughly 13 times the combined volume of the other two.

But trading volume is not the only dimension. Hyperliquid’s users are crypto-native on-chain traders, whose interest in prediction market events (elections, macro) is far lower than that of Kalshi’s policy watchers or Polymarket’s speculative players. Whether Hyperliquid can build liquidity for prediction markets on HIP-4 remains unknown.

The current situation is that Hyperliquid wants to enter the prediction market side, while Kalshi and Polymarket want to enter the perpetual contracts side. Both sides have planted a flag at the entrance to the other’s territory.

Whoever deepens liquidity first will have the upper hand. But one thing is certain: before Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 is fully implemented, Kalshi and Polymarket’s choice to take this step on the same day is not just a product launch; it’s more like a positioning move. The combined monthly trading volume of the two platforms already exceeds $18 billion. They hold the only compliant leveraged derivatives license in the US and target US retail users outside the crypto-native circle. These are conditions Hyperliquid currently lacks.

The simultaneous launch of perpetual contracts by two prediction markets has, for the first time, placed prediction market products on the same competitive field as crypto derivatives products. And what catalyzed this timing is a threat that hasn’t fully materialized yet.

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