A first look at Polymarket perpetuals
Polymarket opened perpetual futures on crypto, stocks, gold and oil to the public on September 3, promising the deepest liquidity and the lowest fees. Hyperliquid lists all 88 of its underlyings. We measured both venues on volume, books, fees and the cost of a trade.
Do Polymarket’s perps have the deepest liquidity and the lowest fees?
Polymarket, the prediction market, opened perpetual futures to the public on September 3, 2026, and said they came with the deepest liquidity and the lowest fees (Mondal, 2026; Juricic, 2026). A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry, held near the price of its underlying by hourly funding payments between buyers and sellers. On October 4 Polymarket listed 88 of them, all trading around the clock: 40 on crypto tokens and 48 on stocks, indexes and commodities. A position can be as large as 50 times its margin on Bitcoin, Ether and the two US index contracts, and 10 times on three-quarters of the rest. Hyperliquid, a crypto exchange built for perpetuals, lists all 88 underlyings: the crypto on its own exchange, and the stocks, indexes and commodities on the xyz exchange that trade.xyz runs on Hyperliquid.
Trading costs are counted in basis points, hundredths of a percent, so a $10,000 trade that costs 10 basis points costs $10. A round trip buys and then sells at market, so it pays every cost twice. Those costs are the spread between the best price to buy and the best price to sell, the worse prices a large order meets as it works through the order book, and the fee.
The claim holds for the depth of Polymarket’s book near the price, and for large orders in stocks and commodities. On Sunday, October 4, Polymarket’s book held more in resting orders within 10 basis points of the price than trade.xyz’s on 47 of the 48 stock, index and commodity contracts. That made Polymarket the cheaper venue for a $1 million round trip on 10 of the 12 stocks and all 4 commodities that both books could fill. The depth is bought: Polymarket pays traders $75,000 a day to keep quotes near the price, 3.4 times what the exchange earns in fees.
On fees, Polymarket undercuts Hyperliquid only on crypto. There it charges 0.04% of the trade on an order that fills at once against the book, just under Hyperliquid’s 0.045%. On 45 of the 48 other contracts trade.xyz charges 0.009%, so Polymarket’s fee is 4.4 times as high.
On volume, Hyperliquid leads in every category, and it trades $85 for every dollar traded on Polymarket in the same 88 underlyings (Fig. 1). Over the 30 days to October 3 that came to $7.67 billion a day against $90.6 million.
Hyperliquid out-trades Polymarket in every category, by 35 to 113 times.
Dollars traded on Hyperliquid for each dollar traded on Polymarket in the same underlyings, daily average from September 4 to October 3, 2026, counting one side of each trade.
How we tested it
Every number comes from the venues’ own public data, read on October 4, 2026. Polymarket’s API reports its daily volume, fees and open interest, hourly price and volume bars and funding for each contract, its order books, and a ranking of accounts by how much each has traded (Polymarket, 2026a). Hyperliquid’s and Binance’s APIs supply the same bars, funding and books for the matching contracts (Hyperliquid, 2026a; Binance, 2026).
The 48 contracts outside crypto are 38 single stocks, 6 indexes and index funds, and 4 commodities. Volume and funding are compared over the month from September 4 to October 3. The order books of all three venues were read every five minutes on Sunday, October 4, from 05:54 to 13:30 UTC, 92 rounds in all. Stock and index contracts trade on both venues at those hours while their home markets are shut. Each round trip is two market orders costed against the visible book, plus two taker fees at each venue’s published base tier, the rate a new account pays. Polymarket’s index price was checked against Hyperliquid’s oracle once a minute over the same morning.
Polymarket built a $90 million a day exchange, and 100 accounts do nearly all the trading
By October 3, Polymarket’s perpetuals had matched $16.24 billion of trades since opening to beta traders on May 6, 2026, and earned the exchange $3.44 million in fees (Fig. 2). The busiest week came early, during the beta, with $1.53 billion traded in the week to May 31. After 39 contracts went live to Polymarket’s users on August 1, the exchange averaged about $114 million a day, and since the public launch on September 3 it has averaged about $90 million. Open interest, the value of positions held open, nearly tripled over those two months, from $27.2 million on August 1 to $77.4 million on October 3.
Polymarket's volume peaked in the beta and fell after the public launch.
Matched volume across all Polymarket perpetuals, seven-day average, millions of dollars a day, May 12 to October 3, 2026; dashed lines mark August 1, when 39 contracts went live, and the public launch on September 3.
A handful of accounts make that volume. Of the 26,977 accounts that have traded, the 100 largest account for 97.8% of all the dollars traded, and the 10 largest for more than half. The single largest account has traded nearly one dollar in seven. Trading is patchy in time as well: the median single-stock contract traded in 70% of the hours it was live during the month, and the quietest, Unitree, in just over a third.
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