HIP-4 (outcome markets) will support permissionless deployment in a future network upgrade, first on testnet and then on mainnet. As with spot and perp deployments, the technology for outcome markets required sufficient battle testing in a validator-deployed setting before scaling to permissionless deployment.
Permissionless deployments are especially important for the growth of outcome markets. The possible universe of tradeable outcomes is vast. The number of suitable discrete events for outcomes dwarfs the number of underlying assets for perps and spot tokenization.
To ensure markets are high quality and well defined, validators will vote on outcome templates, which HIP-4 deployers will be able to use as the basis for permissionless deployments. The specifications for the templates will be stored and enforced onchain. The set of templates will reflect outcomes that correspond to events with sufficient liquidity and interest. Templates will be constrained by validator vote to be healthy and unambiguous public goods for the ecosystem. Each HIP-4 deployer will be able to instantiate any template in their deployments. Deployers are responsible for defining and settling each market in accordance with the settlement criteria specified in the template’s instantiation. There is no restriction against multiple deployers deploying the exact same template instantiations.
Canonical markets may still be deployed directly by validators from time to time, but these are expected to be rare. These canonical markets will be determined by validator vote, and ideally will represent fewer than 10 outcomes or questions per year.
The staking requirement for HIP-4 deployers will be 500k HYPE. The staking requirement is subject to slashing by validator vote in case markets are poorly defined, settled incorrectly according to the template, or remain incorrectly unsettled for more than 1 week. As with HIP-3, deployer stake is locked for 6 months. To unstake, a deployer must settle all markets. Therefore, particular consideration should be given to very long dated outcomes. Initially, each deployer will have an allocation of 100 outcomes (200 outcome tokens). Multi-outcome questions may consume multiple allocated outcomes. When an outcome is settled, its allocation is freed and can be reused. An auction mechanism to expand the allocation per deployer will be introduced as a follow-up feature.
HIP-4 deployers will be able to set up to 50% fee share on their deployed markets. Fee configurability will be released as a follow-up feature. As previously announced, only AQAv2 quote tokens are eligible for HIP-4.
All specifications described above are preliminary and subject to change based on feedback. A future announcement will be made once permissionless deployment is available on testnet and the Docs are updated.
