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Who is trading on Trade.xyz?

Jaleel加六

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Over 30,000 wallets, all originating from the same Polymarket account named "Themino"

Original Title:《Who is actually trading on Trade.xyz?》

Original Author: @web3_pastel, Arrakis Finance

Translation: Jaleel Jia Liu, Odaily BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

In the realm of Hyperliquid, one of the most prominent names in 2026 is Trade.xyz. It is the first product to emerge after the launch of HIP-3, a "permissionless perpetual market deployment framework", moving assets such as US stocks, crude oil, and silver from the traditional financial realm, which used to operate only during certain hours, to a 24/7 on-chain order book.

In just a few months, it has grown from a niche experiment with only the XYZ100 index to a chain-based trading venue handling markets such as oil, Tesla, and silver, with an average monthly trading volume exceeding $500 billion.

However, at the same time, there has been considerable discussion on the web regarding its controversy: among those impressive wallet figures, how many belong to real users, and how many are aimed at unreleased tokens or mass-produced witches?

This research by Arrakis yielded quite an interesting result: the witch layer does exist, with over 30,000 wallets traced back to the same Polymarket account "Themino"; however, it underpins user activity, not dollars. What truly drives the trading volume are several professional market makers, several high-frequency trading bots from Bybit backgrounds, and a long tail of retail investors highly overlapping with the Polymarket user base.

Below is the full article:

Abstract

When we wrote the first piece "Who is trading on HIP-3?", our attribution method was statistical. We classified addresses based on their trading behavior over the past three months: addresses primarily engaging in placing orders were categorized as market makers, those conducting high-frequency taker trades were classified as arbitrageurs, and orders with low fill rates and a builder tag were categorized as retail. This approach did reveal some interesting market structure characteristics, but the classification was probabilistic, and around 70% of addresses remain unclassified.

This article replaces statistical inference with mechanized classification. Each order on @HyperliquidX comes with a set of deterministic labels signed and issued by the exchange: Time in Force (ALO, GTC, IOC, FrontendMarket), builder code, trade flag, holding time. We used this order metadata to place each wallet into one of four categories: Retail, Liquidity Provider, Arbitrage Bot, Rug Pull Wallet.

The second step involved identifying the wallets behind these categories, extracting identity and transactional behavior data from @arkham and HyperTracker's API. The top 450 wallets accounted for 78% of the total trading volume. Within this set of wallets, we identified several accounts linked to @Polymarket, @jump_, @SeliniCapital, @wintermute_t, Abraxas Capital, and others.

Through this two-step classification method, we observed several patterns, which will be detailed below.

Trade.xyz Wallet Analysis

We observed a time window from March 10, 2026, to March 31, 2026, spanning 21 days. During this period, @tradexyz's four markets (xyz:CL Crude Oil, xyz:SILVER Silver, xyz:TSLA Tesla, xyz:XYZ100) saw a total of 79,622 unique participating wallets, with a total trading volume of $519.5 billion.

79,622 participating wallets broke down by trading volume. While Liquidity Providers accounted for less than 0.5% of wallets, they handled 63% of every dollar traded.

Classified by wallet count (not volume). Airdrop Rug Pull Wallets comprised 35,091 wallets, almost half of the identified wallets.

The Airdrop Rug Pull Wallet category is one of the largest by wallet count but one of the smallest by trading volume share. The 35,091 wallets represent 44.07% of the total number of wallets but generated only $400 million in trading volume throughout the entire window, accounting for just 0.77% of the $519.5 billion total volume on the trading venue. Nearly half of the active wallets on Trade.xyz contributed to less than 1% of the total volume.

Upon market breakdown, another distinct pattern emerges.

Wallet Market Distribution. xyz:CL absorbed 99.3% of airdrop farming accounts, as its execution cost was most optimal

Out of 35,091 airdrop farming accounts, 34,859 (99.3%) transacted xyz:CL within this window, with the remaining 232 spread across xyz:SILVER, xyz:TSLA, and xyz:XYZ100. This pattern aligns with the characteristics of airdrop farming accounts: each wallet engages in small bi-directional transactions repeatedly, boosting transaction volume without taking on price risk. This strategy relies on tight execution costs and is highly sensitive to slippage. xyz:CL has the best depth among the four markets on Trade.xyz, naturally making it the preferred venue for such activities.

Another notable observation is the entities behind these addresses. On-chain tracking provided below reveals 34,553 farming account wallets associated with a single Polymarket operator. This single entity alone represents 43.4% of all participating wallets on Trade.xyz during this window.

On the other end of the spectrum is market-making. 363 wallets, comprising 0.46% of active addresses, drove $32.75 billion in volume during the window, 63% of every dollar on Trade.xyz. The other three categories fall in between. 522 SAT/HFT bots contributed $3.5 billion (6.7%). 38,307 wallets categorized as retail contributed $8.7 billion (16.7%). 5,339 wallets uncategorized contributed $6.61 billion (12.7%).

Within the uncategorized category at 12.7% of the volume, there is no qualitative way to classify this based solely on metadata. It is plausible that a significant portion comes from retail users placing limit orders via the Hyperliquid frontend or market and limit orders via the Trade.xyz frontend. Both these channels do not attribute explicit builder codes or dedicated TIF labels to orders, making these trades invisible under a metadata-driven classification approach.

Weighted Average Time in Force Distribution by Category. Market makers unsurprisingly are 98.5% ALO orders, with arbitrage bots at 100% IOC orders. The uncategorized category sees 71.5% in GTC, a hallmark of frontend manual limit order placement

The TIF provides support for the above speculation: 71.5% of orders in the uncategorized category have a GTC (Good Till Cancel) time-in-force label, which is typically used when a front-end user places a static limit order.

「Themino」 Exposed Over 30,000 Wallets

Over the past few weeks, there has been much discussion in the market: Was the impressive user count on Trade.xyz truly driven by human participation, or was it propped up by airdrop farming accounts ahead of the expected TGE? We have no intention to comment on the broader farming landscape of the exchange, but after analyzing the trading data for four Trade.xyz markets in March, a noteworthy pattern has indeed emerged.

Analyst Jascha pointed out that 92.5% of XYZ addresses have never transacted on any other HIP-3 deployer

Among the 34,602 wallets identified as airdrop farming accounts, 34,553, or 99.9%, can be traced back to a single entity named 「Themino」 on Polymarket.

「Themino」, a Polymarket identity on Arbitrum, spawned 70 distinct linear chains covering 34,553 wallets

How was this orchestrated? Hyperliquid's L1 provides a primitive called internalTransfer, enabling the transfer of USDC between wallets, with a fixed fee of $1 regardless of the amount. The operator of Themino leveraged this primitive to cascade a seed deposit through tens of thousands of brand-new wallets. Each wallet would execute the same five-step sequence in approximately 26 seconds:

1. Receive $X via internalTransfer from the previous farming wallet, with $1 deducted en route as the HL transfer fee.

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

3. Execute two IOC orders on xyz:CL, one buy and one sell, resulting in two trades and adding some trading volume.

4. Transfer around $13.99 back to the main account (with the $0.01 difference reserved for execution slippage and transaction fees).

5. Deduct $X by $1 through internalTransfer to transfer to the next rug pull wallet.

The next wallet then repeats the same set of actions.

Through 34,510 internal transfers, Themino lost a total of $34,510 in protocol fees, continuing his trading history on Polymarket.

On Polymarket, Themino also bet on "Will the US launch a strike against Iran by February 28, 2026?" with a "no" and lost about $80,000. The strike occurred on February 28.

What are the types of Builders?

Hyperliquid will assign an identifier to orders routed through a third-party frontend for these applications to charge custom frontend fees. This identifier is the builder code, the most direct way to determine which interface a wallet is using, if any. Among wallets trading on four markets, these builders can be roughly classified into three types.

Algorithmic Builders. These are products for retail users to maximize trading volume on DEX and to earn points for potential airdrops. Before the end of 2025, scoring points on a perpetual DEX meant either washing trades or running non-directional algorithmic trades against each other, which was costly for participants and net negative for the exchange. Retail market-making bots like @tread_fi, @PlanemoTrading, @origamitech_ have replaced the practice of washing trades with genuinely valuable liquidity provision. Every order these products place is post-only, so wallets are adding liquidity to the order book rather than consuming it.

As CEO @davidyjeong of @tread_fi stated: "Before retail market-making solutions existed, scoring points on a perpetual DEX meant washing trades, inflating trading volume at the cost of execution fees, slippage, and the risk of getting banned. We’ve addressed this issue with a brand new scoring scheme: bots only put maker orders on both sides. Users score points at a lower cost, often even making money from the captured spread, with the by-product being that the market has gained genuinely tight liquidity, something that HIP-3 Perpetual desperately needs but traditional market makers don’t want to provide overnight and on weekends. It’s a better way to score points and the reason why the HIP-3 market has excellent execution today."

These market maker bots' contribution to the market is most prominent during the absence of traditional market makers. The CME's WTI futures close on Friday afternoon and reopen on Sunday evening, and perpetual stocks face the same "overnight and weekend" gap. During these periods, retail market maker bots supported the order book on markets such as xyz:CL and xyz:TSLA.

It is important to note that in this analysis, we classify wallets routed through these algorithmic products as airdrop farming accounts, but their trading behavior and market impact are structurally different from witching activities.

Wallet-Embedded Builders are perpetual contract interfaces embedded inside consumer-grade 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. The average transaction volume per wallet ranges from $1,000 to $3,000, aligning with the order size of a group of retail traders who prioritize usability over marginal builder fees.

Application-Based Builders are independent perpetual frontends and integrated products: targeting traders, providing specialized workflows for users who find wallet plugins insufficient and need better order placement, charts, position management, and execution tools. This group has fewer wallets than wallet-embedded types but higher transaction volumes per wallet, fitting a group of advanced users who value depth of features over plug-and-play convenience. These products include @InsilicoTrading Terminal, @liquidtrading, @hypurrdash, @BasedOneX, @Dreamcash, @infinex, @pear_protocol, @defiapp, @pvp_dot_trade.

Growth lead at @InsilicoTrading @0xVKTR (the team behind Insilico Terminal) describes it as follows: "At Insilico, we see the HIP-3 market as the next step in bringing real-world exposure native to the crypto track. Traders want more than just another frontend. They seek fast execution, clean market access, and the ability to seamlessly switch between crypto and macro assets without leaving existing workflows. Trade.xyz is a clear testament to this demand. The order flow routed through Insilico demonstrates that when the trading environment has depth, the product is useful, and the trading experience is crafted for serious participants, on-chain perpetuals have a real base of sophisticated users."

Who Is Trade.xyz's Largest Liquidity Provider?

The liquidity distribution on Trade.xyz markets is highly concentrated. The top 5 liquidity providers account for 50% of the total liquidity, the top 13 account for 80%, and the top 21 account for 90%. A few prominent liquidity providers support the majority of the exchange's liquidity pool.

Liquidity provided distribution based on wallet rankings. The top 5 LPs represent 50% of total liquidity, the top 13 represent 80%, and the top 21 represent 90%.

The second-largest liquidity provider is one of the most intriguing wallets in the entire sample. The wallet address 0xc926ddba...98d3 has a trading volume of $43.9 billion, a fill rate of 0.52%, embodying a textbook maker profile. Arkham has identified this address as "Powell" on Polymarket. Surprisingly, one of the largest liquidity providers on Trade.xyz is a Polymarket user who cross-marks across multiple markets on HIP-3.

Other notable liquidity providers include:

Jump Crypto operates two wallets, totaling $31.5 billion, with funds coming from 0xf584...d621, a wallet clustered by Arkham as the Jump Treasury, holding over $160 million in diversified inventory covering LINK, LIT, EIGEN, BNB, ETH, USDC, and USDT.

Selini Capital runs three wallets: two pure maker quotes (0x44a3e1...35dd, 0x76987c...4480) and one pure aggressive taker (0x427be6...d1d9), all through APIs. Selini totals $10.3 billion. They are labeled part of Hyperliquid's order flow, distinguishing Selini's liquidity wallets from its HFT wallets, with the same LP simultaneously providing liquidity on both sides of the order book.

Wintermute runs a market-making wallet with $2.296 billion (0xecb63caa…2b00) in size, smaller than Jump or Selini. The funding source is @okx.

Trade.xyz top market makers ranked by trading volume. Powell, Jump Crypto, Selini Capital, Wintermute occupy the portion visible in the ledger

Apart from these well-known market-making desks, most of the volume comes from wallets with no on-chain attribution but clean funding sources: @krakenfx, @binance, @coinbase, @unitxyz bridge, or HL native funds. Their behavioral patterns are typical of market makers, but the operators have never touched any service that Arkham could stitch back to an identity.

The median order-to-trade ratio for market makers is 19.4, meaning that for every trade, about 18 orders are placed, part of a posted bid-ask that is then canceled. Similarly, the top 5 market makers show repeated presence across four xyz markets simultaneously, indicating these are cross-market-quoting desks rather than separate businesses.

During the observation period, the liquidation rate for market makers was 19.2%, almost on par with retail at 20.4%. Market makers on Trade.xyz incur directional exposure when their quotes are taken: a sell order hitting a bid order turns the desk long, and a buy hitting an ask turns the desk short. During the March oil price turmoil, the inventory on the ledger moved in the opposite direction at a faster pace than the market-makers' hedging, resulting in one-fifth of market makers being liquidated at least once.

Statistical Arbitrage Takers / High-Frequency Trading Bots

SAT is the counterparty of market-makers. These wallets run over 90% IOC (Immediate or Cancel) order combinations, pure aggressive liquidity takers, specifically targeting the quotes posted by market makers.

Top SAT/HFT robots ranked by trading volume. The first 4 wallets represent 89% of SAT's ledger, with the funding concentrated on Bybit

Out of the $35 billion in the SAT ledger, the top 4 Sats accounted for $31 billion, resulting in a concentration level of 89%. Two of them are running at 100% IOC, meaning that every order they place is "Immediate Or Cancel," with no maker intent whatsoever.

Funding source clustering has identified @Bybit_Official as the main SAT profile. Most of the trading volume of the top SATs can be traced back to wallets funded by Bybit, aligning with the profile of a single bot-operating entity or a small bot-operating circle.

Three of these SATs have Polymarket accounts: loracles (trading volume of $15.5 million, HL cumulative PnL +$25.7 million), Conduit ($5.3 million), ChadwickLongman ($3.7 million). Polymarket's presence here is similar to its dominance in the retail section below, as the prediction market community is the most common cross-platform identity on Trade.xyz.

During the window period, the SAT liquidation rate was 8.1%, about half of the liquidation rate for market makers and retail traders. This group is the most risk-averse on the ledger, hedging their positions externally and almost never triggering margin calls.

Retail Overlaps Significantly with Polymarket

We performed an in-depth analysis of the top 400 retail wallets by trading volume, excluding algorithmic products mentioned earlier such as Hyperliquid UI and front-running orders embedded in wallets (Tread.fi, Planemo Trading, and the broader algorithm builder group).

Top 400 retail wallets by trading volume categorized by attribution. Polymarket identified wallets dominate the known part, contributing $1.63 billion in volume to this group.

Polymarket: Polymarket account identifiable through the Arkham on-chain tagging system.

@ensdomains/social identity: ENS name or other social graph identifier holders that cannot be traced back to a Polymarket account.

CEX Deposit: Funds originate from a centralized exchange's anonymous wallet.

Bridge Deposit: Wallet funded through a cross-chain bridge deposit.

Others: Self-custody EOA, smart contract infrastructure, empty address activity.

The most prominent is the share of Polymarket. Out of 400 top retail wallets, 94 wallets, representing 22% of the top retail trading volume ($16.3 billion), come from verifiable Polymarket users. This is the largest identifiable single group within the retail cohort. Adding Polymarket's LP (Powell, $4.39 billion) and three Polymarket-related SATs ($24 million) together, Polymarket's total footprint on Trade.xyz is around $6 billion.

Among the top 15 retail wallets by trading volume, some Polymarket wallets included:

This overlap is logical. Polymarket and Trade.xyz provide exposure to real-world outcomes for crypto-native users through two different market structures, prediction markets, and perpetual futures. Wallet-level data shows the same individuals moving back and forth between the two ledgers from the same EVM address.

ENS holders contributed 26 retail wallets totaling around $400 million. Notable wallets include caydenb.eth ($33 million), eggnoodle.eth ($33 million), ethmerg.eth ($19 million), baitf1sh.eth ($16 million), wanyekest69.eth ($6.8 million, cumulative P&L +$17.6 million).

Non-identified wallets split by funding source:

CEX Deposit retail wallets split by exchange source. Kraken leads in the non-identified CEX deposit cohort

Bridge-recharged retail wallets split by the source of the bridge. Hyperunit and deBridge dominate the bridge recharge group, with Stargate and the long tail making up the rest.

@krakenfx dominates the CEX recharge group. Hyperunit and @debridge dominate the bridge recharge group, with @StargateFinance and a long list of other bridges making up the rest. In other words, the three types of people who are actually driving the Trade.xyz order book are: Polymarket cross-chain traders, independent traders recharged through Kraken, and DeFi natives entering through Hyperunit or deBridge.

When the three groups of market makers, SAT, and retail are combined, we get a compact picture of the Trade.xyz participant base, which has already shed the witch layer to be discussed later.

Participant base after shedding the witch layer. A few professional market makers quoting to a few robot squads, along with a long tail consisting of Polymarket veterans and CEX recharge independent traders, placing targeted bets through the Hyperliquid UI.

A few professional market makers quoting to a few robot squads, along with a long tail consisting of Polymarket veterans and CEX recharge independent traders, placing targeted bets through the Hyperliquid UI, this is the merged view of the Trade.xyz ledger.

Summary

Recent discussions around Trade.xyz have focused on one question: is participation real, or is this exchange actually dominated by whales aiming for the expected TGE? Analysis provides a layered answer.

As with any DeFi market prior to a TGE, Trade.xyz does indeed have a whale layer, a classic example being an operator using a "relay baton" approach to rug pulling, running tens of thousands of wallets. However, the whale layer is propped up by wallet count, not dollar transaction volume.

We have not found any evidence of an independent high-volume wash trading operation built to inflate dollar transaction volume. The seemingly wash-traded part of the data is mostly due to retail market makers running: wallets placing orders on both sides of the book to add depth to the order book rather than take away from it.

The real transaction volume comes from identifiable ledgers. A significant portion of the top retail wallets is associated with a Polymarket account, ENS record, or social graph identity, while the largest cryptocurrency liquidity providers (Jump Crypto, Selini Capital, Wintermute) have also left clear footprints, alongside the hedge fund Abraxas Capital. The high overlap between the retail group and Polymarket is quite unusual, with the latter being a product built around the same speculative bias.

The inflated wallet count is a foreseeable behavior prior to the TGE, but this does not extend to the dollar transaction volume, nor to the identifiable groups carrying out these transactions.

A special thanks to HyperTracker and numerous contributors for their help with data availability.

For the full methodology, please visit our blog.

Authored by: @web3_pastel Design and Editing: @oxillustration, @mchammond Special thanks to @0xArchiveIO, @HyperTracker (provided by @Coinmarketman), and @stacy_muur for their contributions to this research. This article is for reference and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Arrakis has made reasonable efforts to verify the accuracy of the data in this article but does not guarantee that all information is accurate, complete, or timely.