Is it the next Hyperliquid or just a flash in the pan? A deep dive into the Lighter project

The perpetual swap exchange market is undergoing a technological revolution. After Hyperliquid ignited the DeFi derivatives market and ushered in a new era for the industry, Aster, with CZ personally calling the shots, has recently emerged as a rising star, even eclipsing Hyperliquid and adding fuel to the fire. Beyond the shimmering influence of these two star projects, a new project called Lighter has also been quietly gaining momentum. Leveraging its unique zero-fee model and ZK Rollup technology, it has attracted over 56,000 users and locked up $700 million in capital in just a few months, garnering significant market attention. What exactly makes this project, hailed as the "next Hyperliquid," so unique? Core Features: ZK Architecture Optimized for Trading Traditional CEXs are fast, but centralized and opaque, making them prone to "black box" operations that harm traders. While DEXs put all operations on-chain, making exchange behavior transparent and verifiable, they can result in slower transaction matching and a poor user experience. To address this issue, different DEX technology schools have emerged: Taking dYdX as an example, both employ "off-chain matching and on-chain settlement." While this improves order matching and execution speed, the off-chain aspects remain opaque, reverting to the state of a centralized exchange (CEX). Hyperliquid is the first successful, large-scale, fully on-chain DEX. Hyperliquid is more than just a simple DEX; it's a Layer 1 platform purpose-built for trading. By comprehensively optimizing its execution and consensus layers, Hyperliquid achieves full on-chain exchange functionality while maintaining high throughput, meeting the real-time requirements of professional trading teams such as high-frequency traders and market makers. Lighter, however, has taken a third approach. Lighter is a zk-rollup within the Ethereum ecosystem. Its exchange functions (such as order matching and forced liquidation) are all performed by a single sequencer on Layer 2, similar to a centralized exchange (CEX). This makes it fast but opaque. To address these shortcomings, Lighter uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZK Proofs) to ensure fair trading. A ZK proof is generated for each matching and forced liquidation calculation and submitted to Layer 1 for verification. This means that all matching strictly adheres to the price-time priority principle, preventing backroom dealings or queue-jumping (this should be the case in theory, but what about the reality? I'll discuss this more later). Therefore, Lighter takes the third path of "centralized execution, decentralized verification," achieving a balance between execution efficiency and trust restoration. However, these solutions also have drawbacks. Traditional ZK Rollup requires processing a variety of complex smart contract operations, and proof generation is often slow, failing to meet the real-time requirements of professional trading teams. Lighter's greatest strength lies in its proprietary ZK Rollup technology. Unlike general-purpose ZK Rollup solutions on the market, Lighter is deeply optimized specifically for order book trading. Furthermore, by focusing solely on matching logic, Lighter significantly simplifies the complexity of zero-knowledge proofs, achieving sub-second ZK Proof generation, meeting the real-time requirements of professional trading teams.

Two-layer architecture security

Lighter's core architecture adopts the design concept of "assets are managed in Layer 1, and transactions are executed in Layer 2". Specifically:

• Layer 1 (Ethereum Mainnet): Responsible for fund custody, all user assets are stored in audited smart contracts.

• Layer 2 (Lighter Network): Responsible for high-speed matching and settlement, and the final account status is published on L1 in the form of compressed diff.

The biggest advantage of this design is security. Even if Lighter's Layer2 system completely collapses, users' funds are still safely stored on the Ethereum mainnet and can be retrieved through the emergency exit mechanism.

LLP Dual-Purpose Innovation

Lighter has a public liquidity pool LLP (similar to an insurance fund) to absorb losses from short selling and provide market-making liquidity for the platform. Users can deposit funds into LLP, contributing liquidity to Lighter while enjoying market-making returns. This design mimics Hyperliquid's HLP mechanism. In future versions, users depositing LLPs will not only earn market-making returns as LPs, but will also be allowed to use LP shares as margin for trading, achieving dual utilization of funds. This design eliminates idle funds and improves capital efficiency (similar to Aster's USDF and other yield-generating collateral models). However, this feature has not yet been launched, and implementation requires careful consideration of risk control, which I will discuss in detail in the following sections. Zero Fee Strategy Lighter adopts a rather bold business model in the DeFi space—completely waiving transaction fees for ordinary users. Whether maker or taker, users enjoy zero-cost transactions. This is undoubtedly a huge draw in the DeFi world, where transaction fees can easily reach tens of thousands of digits. So how does the platform maintain operations and profitability? The answer is a "paid API model." For regular users: Makers and takers are both free, but there is a 200-300 millisecond latency in matching. For premium accounts: Makers are charged 0.002% and takers 0.02%. However, matching latency has been significantly reduced: order cancellations take 0 milliseconds, and takers take 150 milliseconds. Professional traders and market makers are willing to pay these fees for lower latency and better service quality. The platform also generates revenue through clearing fees (up to 1%) and other value-added services. However, remember that "free is the most expensive thing in the world." Lighter's free strategy is reminiscent of Robinhood's "payment for order flow" (PFOF) scheme. Furthermore, zero fees also encourage some "wash trading," a risk I'll discuss further below. Lighter will begin testing at the end of 2023, with an early version (then called "zkLighter") operational in 2024 and private beta testing beginning in early 2025. As of September 2025, the platform remains in an invitation-only testnet/closed beta phase and has not yet been fully opened to the public. The specific mainnet launch and token issuance dates have not yet been officially announced. Due to the lack of a mainnet launch, the Lighter core code is not yet fully open source. However, the smart contracts have passed audits (the ZK circuits are audited by ZKSecurity). Code details may be made public simultaneously with the mainnet launch for community oversight.

Growth data performance

From the data performance, Lighter's growth is indeed remarkable:

• User scale: As of September 2025, the number of registered users has exceeded 56,000.

• Capital scale: The total locked value (TVL) has soared from US$2.5 million in March this year to more than US$700 million, a 280-fold increase. Trading Activity: Daily trading volume has climbed from a few hundred million dollars in the summer to approximately $8 billion recently, reaching $18.9 billion on September 25, 2025, rapidly approaching Hyperliquid's market share. Recently, its daily trading volume has even surpassed Hyperliquid's. However, Lighter's open interest (OI) is relatively low. Currently, Lighter's OI is approximately $1.3 billion, an order of magnitude lower than Hyperliquid's $13 billion and lower than Aster's recent $1.5 billion. High trading volume and low OI suggest that Lighter and Aster, two newly popular platforms, are subject to frequent short-term arbitrage trading, which I will analyze in the risk section later.

  

  Competitive Analysis

  As a new-generation ZK-based perpetual DEX, Lighter is often compared to Hyperliquid (the star project that first ignited the perps craze) and Aster (a rising star backed by the Binance ecosystem). Below, we compare Lighter with Hyperliquid and Aster in terms of decentralization, performance throughput, product features, and ecosystem integration, analyzing their respective strengths and weaknesses.

  Underlying Architecture and Decentralization

  • Hyperliquid: The customized Layer 1 has multiple validation nodes, which is theoretically decentralized. However, due to the small number of nodes and their full team control, the actual degree of decentralization is limited.

  • Aster: The core matching is implemented off-chain, making it more centralized.

  • Lighter: As a Rollup, only a single Sequencer is responsible for matching, and the execution layer is centralized. However, verifying ZK Proofs consumes very few resources and can be verified by lightweight nodes, so the verification process is highly decentralized, which makes up for the shortcomings of "centralized execution." Furthermore, all asset ledgers are on the Ethereum mainnet, allowing users to independently retrieve their funds even if the Lighter team disappears, fully guaranteeing asset security. Performance and Trading Experience Hyperliquid: Processes hundreds of thousands of orders per second, remaining stable even in extreme market conditions without congestion or downtime. Lighter: Achieves millisecond-level matching and sub-second zero-knowledge proof generation, providing an experience close to that of centralized exchanges. Performance is adequate, with minor lag in extreme situations. Aster: Limited by the BNB chain's 3-second block time, performance is relatively weak. To bridge the performance gap, ordinary users can trade with its automated market making pool with one click, effectively tapping into the AMM pool's liquidity without having to wait for an order. In the future, Aster plans to launch its own ZK Rollup chain to improve performance and privacy, making its future architecture more similar to Lighter. Product Features and Innovations: Hyperliquid: As a pioneer, its functionality is relatively balanced and mature, offering both spot trading and perpetual contract trading. HIP-3 allows users to create their own contract markets, which will undoubtedly boost trading of RWA products like US stocks on Hyperliquid. HIP-4 proposes a "prediction market" on Hyperliquid. Aster: Leveraging Binance's influence to rapidly acquire customers. It features three innovative features: multi-chain liquidity sharing, 1001x leverage, and planned dark pool trading, attracting high-risk speculators. Furthermore, Aster has launched perpetual swaps for US stocks, including contracts for Tesla and Apple, allowing users to trade US stock prices 24/7. Lighter: As an Ethereum Layer 2, it is expected to be highly compatible with the Ethereum mainnet and other Rollup ecosystems. For example, it directly supports users using any mainstream Ethereum asset as collateral and can integrate with Ethereum wallets and strategy protocols, leveraging the combined advantages of Ethereum's DeFi LEGO®. Furthermore, Lighter's planned dual-use LLP margin feature is a potential innovation: it allows liquidity providers to earn market-making profits while also gaining trading opportunities, effectively granting LPs the attributes of income-generating collateral. Hyperliquid's liquidity depth and transaction costs are significant. Leveraging its massive market-making pool (the HLP pool once reached over $1.5 billion) and extensive institutional market-making participation, Hyperliquid boasts an orderbook depth for mainstream trading pairs that even surpasses some second-tier CEXs, with minimal slippage and implied spreads. While its transaction fees are not zero, at 0.01% for makers and 0.03-0.05% for takers, they are exceptionally low among DEXs. Overall, Hyperliquid offers a low-cost environment for large-cap traders, approaching that of CEXs. Lighter takes the approach of offering zero fees in exchange for wider spreads: while ordinary users don't pay fees, the apparent cost is lower. However, market makers, in order to profit, will widen the bid-ask spread to cover these costs. Therefore, the actual spreads experienced by Lighter users may be slightly higher than those experienced on Hyperliquid. This is particularly true for niche trading pairs, as Lighter lacks widespread market maker participation and liquidity depth is relatively limited. Some users have reported that Lighter's market depth lags behind Hyperliquid's for some altcoins. Aster's situation is more complex: its standard mode provides liquidity through an ALP automated market making pool, with liquidity depth determined by the pool's asset size and algorithm. In its Pro mode, market makers' funds are dispersed due to its multi-chain nature, and Binance-affiliated market makers are primarily concentrated on the BNB chain, resulting in limited liquidity for non-BNB chain assets.

  Valuation Analysis

  Valuation based on revenue forecasts:

  Hyperliquid Reference

  • Daily revenue is conservatively over $3 million, which translates to annualized revenue of approximately $1.1-1.2 billion.

  • Based on HYPE's current FDV of approximately $45 billion, this translates to a PE ratio of approximately 40x.

  Lighter Forecast

  :

  • Lighter's recent trading volume has exceeded $8 billion. However, considering that Lighter's current strong momentum may not be sustainable, and given the market's general belief that this volume includes excessive wash trading, I cautiously assume a stable average daily trading volume of $4 billion in the future. Lighter currently does not charge fees for standard transactions, with revenue primarily coming from premium account fees. Assuming 20% ​​of daily transactions come from paying users, and an average fee rate of 0.01%, annualized revenue is approximately $4 billion * 20% * 0.01% * 365 = approximately $30 million. Using a 40x PE ratio similar to Hyperliquid, I estimate Lighter's FDV to be approximately $1.2 billion. Polymarket currently predicts an 80% probability that Lighter's IPO valuation will exceed $2 billion, reflecting market optimism. This high premium reflects the market's enthusiasm for high-performance orderbook DEXs.

    Risk Analysis

    Questionable Business Model

    Lighter currently waives user transaction fees, which has indeed attracted a large number of users in the early stages. However, where will the platform's profits come from in the long run? Who will it profit from?

    This "no-fee" strategy is reminiscent of traditional zero-commission platforms like Robinhood. Robinhood shifts its revenue stream to "order flow auctions," charging market makers and high-frequency traders fees to execute at favorable prices. This effectively shifts costs to spreads: while retail investors appear to pay no fees, they may trade at a worse bid-ask spread, leaving the market maker to "take a cut of the spread."

    In a podcast, the founder of Lighter openly expressed his support for the Robinhood model, believing that DeFi could learn from this "feed the pigs, let the cows pay" approach. However, the trader structure in the crypto market differs from that of the US stock market—crypto users are relatively niche and specialized, and are more sensitive to spreads. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a technological migration from vAMMs to CLOB models. If Lighter's zero-fee policy resulted in significantly larger spreads than competing products, experienced traders would notice and churn. Furthermore, since high-speed API payments are Lighter's primary revenue source, the company should have optimized the user experience for this segment. However, some in the community have criticized Lighter's slow opening of external interfaces, the lack of API documentation, and the poor integration experience, raising questions about whether the team is intentionally confining retail order flow to its internal team, avoiding external high-frequency trading and market-making teams. The issue of transaction data authenticity may be inflated. The most obvious abnormal metric is the ratio of trading volume to open interest. While this metric should normally be within a 5x range, Hyperliquid's is approximately 0.76x, while Lighter's is approximately 27x, far exceeding normal levels. This abnormally high turnover rate strongly suggests a high level of frequent short-term arbitrage trading on the platform. Since Lighter has yet to issue a token, users are primarily motivated to inflate trading volume to gain ranking points for future airdrops. Zero transaction fees significantly reduce the cost of inflating trading volume, allowing some users to frequently trade between their own accounts, generating massive trading volumes with virtually no losses. On-chain data analysis shows that many top addresses on Lighter open and close positions thousands of times daily, but rarely hold positions overnight, a characteristic consistent with exploiting short-term losses. The low OI further confirms that there has been no significant increase in real liquidity on the exchange, and that a large portion of trading is likely simply a transfer of funds from one person to another. Once the airdrop ends, this "falsely prosperous" trading volume is likely to vanish quickly, and platform activity faces a precipitous decline. LLP Reuse Risk: LLP plans to allow users to use their LP shares as collateral for future transactions. This "multiple uses" innovation could introduce complex systemic risks. Consider the following extreme scenario: The Lighter team uses funds from the LLP to make markets. While the Lighter team is staffed by professional traders, participating in such transactions carries the risk of losses. A unilateral market fluctuation could cause LLP, acting as the counterparty, to suffer significant losses, leading to a decline in the net value of each LLP share. If a user who uses LLP shares as margin also suffers a losing trade, the number of LLP shares in their margin account will also be deducted. The combined losses from market making and trading will cause the net LLP value and the number of LLP shares in the margin account to decline simultaneously, magnifying the losses in the user's margin account and potentially triggering a series of forced liquidations, further exacerbating system instability. Because of this risk, mature platforms like Hyperliquid operate their insurance funds independently and do not allow users to reuse their collateral. To successfully implement this feature on Lighter, comprehensive risk control mechanisms are needed, such as capping the LLP collateralization ratio, introducing dynamic risk parameter adjustments, and establishing a multi-layered risk buffer mechanism. Uncertainty in Team Governance The success or failure of a startup project is inextricably linked to the quality of the team. Lighter's founder and team possess strong technical backgrounds (founder Vladimir has experience in AI and FinTech, and core members include former institutional quantitative engineers). However, some negative industry rumors have sparked concern. Lighter isn't exactly a new project that became an overnight sensation. Its predecessor, zkLighter, was established as early as 2022, but initially lacked traction. Only after Hyperliquid's popularity in late 2023 did the team accelerate progress, giving the impression that they were rushing to cash out and launch a token. Online rumors have raised concerns about the founder's unstable work style. According to analyst blogger JulianKin, Lighter founder Vladimir Novakovski reneged on commission rebates promised to several partners and reneged on profit sharing. There are also rumors that he indulges in extravagant lifestyles, such as Miami yacht parties, and lacks self-discipline in his personal life. While many sources claim that Lighter has received investment from a16z and Lightspeed, other sources claim that a16z and Lightspeed invested in Novakovski's previous project, Lunchclub, an AI social platform. This suggests that Novakovski actually used funds from Lunchclub to develop Lighter as a side project, only to unexpectedly find success. If these claims are true, Lighter lacks the backing of any reputable institutions and may have been used by investors in the previous project as a cash-out exit. Summary: As an emerging force in the perpetual contract DEX market, Lighter has demonstrated numerous strengths: its innovative ZK Rollup architecture, its zero-fee model, and its rapidly growing user and capital base. As the DeFi derivatives market enters a new round of intense competition, Lighter is undoubtedly a project worthy of attention. However, we must also remain sensible about the risks and challenges involved. The current high trading volume is likely driven by significant amounts of inflated volume for airdrops, and the sustainability of its zero-fee model remains to be seen. More importantly, facing competition from formidable competitors like Hyperliquid and Aster, it remains uncertain whether Lighter can establish a genuine competitive advantage. For investors, Lighter could become the next Hyperliquid-like legend, or it could fade into obscurity after the hype dies down. Its ultimate trajectory deserves our close attention.