How Lighter Is Looking To Take The Perp Dex Crown in 2026

If there is one area of crypto that really blew up in 2025 it was the onchain perpetual futures exchanges. First, it was Hyperliquid, then it was Binance's Aster, and now, it's Lighter.

Built on top of Ethereum, Lighter is taking a unique approach to how it sees perp dexes evolving this year. And so far — that approach seems to be working, with the project scoring a nomination in Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year series.

To learn more about what's in store this year for Lighter, Coinage spoke with the team's head of partnerships, Emanuel Pfyffer von Altishofen. In leading business development efforts, he's been stressing the performance Lighter currently offers for partners.

“Currently we’re processing 15,000 transactions per second and posting every single proof to the Ethereum blockchain,” he told Coinage in a new interview. “To give you an idea, our closest competitor on the scalability side would be Base. And they do around 300 transactions per second.”

To pull that off, Lighter built its own custom ZK-rollup to compress and verify every transaction. Unlike other exchanges that optimize for speed by cutting corners on transparency, von Altishofen said that Lighter puts verifiability at the core of its product.

“We wanted verifiability to be at the core of what we're building, so that users can actually have these cryptographic proofs. That transactions were matched fairly with the best available prices,” he said. “That there isn't sort of giving special treatment to market makers or to other market participants.”

That commitment to trying novel things that appeal to traders also shows up in Lighter’s business model.

“We're a zero-fee exchange, which I would say is probably one of our biggest value propositions,” he explained. “We don't charge retail to trade on the platform. We mainly charge market makers and high frequency traders.”

He described it as the “onchain Robinhood model,” where retail trades for free while institutional participants pay to access retail order flow. “The market maker is happy because they can trade against retail,” he said. “And retail are kind of happy and they have zero fees.”

Clearly, that model has continued to work for Robinhood. Even despite avoiding near-disaster after it was forced to halt trading for customers holding GameStop stock in 2021, the exchange has continued to grow faster than the competition.

But in the onchain world of tokenized assets, the hope among perp dexes is that onchain efficiencies will help avoid the failures that ensnarled Robinhood in the GameStop saga or help enable better pricing for new assets. But before those assets come online, Lighter is focused on seeding users and already got off to a hot start with its LIT token launch in December.

“It kind of created this environment where users were kind of looking for different referral codes and sort of did the marketing for us,” von Altishofen said, adding that about a quarter of the token's supply dropped at the end of the year. But what’s next may matter more.

Lighter has teased the rollout of staking and token-based access to internal liquidity providers. “Users will be able to stake LIT to get access to the internal market maker or the liquidity provider, which currently was gated with points and now will be gated with LIT,” he said.

That access isn’t just for retail — it extends to institutions. “We charge the market makers and the high frequency traders,” he said. “So for them to, let's say, benefit from sort of a fee advantage, they would have to stake a certain amount of LIT as well.”

With no offshore foundation and a U.S.-based team, Lighter is taking a uniquely domestic approach — one that includes active engagement with regulators.

“We actually have a U.S. C-corp, which is where we launched our token out of,” Emanuel said. “Our founder, Vlad, has spent quite a bit of time in DC talking to quite a few of the regulators and sort of advisors in the digital asset space on the market structure bill, the CLARITY Act." (Being backed by some of the biggest names in that regulatory fight — Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and a16z — doesn't hurt either.)

But while perp dexes focus on growth and contend with each other, they are also going to have to defend against the traditional exchanges waking up to tokenization. The New York Stock Exchange, for example, recently announced plans to enable 24/7 trading by utilizing tokenized equities. Robinhood made a big push to enable the same functionality by leveraging Arbitrum's technology.

But if more of these assets continue to come into the Ethereum ecosystem, Lighter may be well positioned to capitalize on the interoperability that could make trading across asset classes more efficient.

“Ethereum is our ecosystem,” von Altishofen said. “If a user wants to trade equities, they could come to Lighter. If they want to trade FX, if they want to trade commodities, if they want to trade spot… if they want to trade options and prediction markets ... that's something that our infrastructure also allows and something that we have on the roadmap.”

Lighter is a featured contender in Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year celebration. Vote to crown the best project in crypto today!

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