Lighter Founder Vlad Novakovski On Leveraging Hyperliquid's Success

Hyperliquid may be the hottest name in crypto trading today, but Lighter founder Vlad Novakovski doesn't see the future as a winner-take-all battle between decentralized exchanges.

In fact, he thinks the real competition isn't happening between projects like Lighter and Hyperliquid at all.

"The reality is that there are a lot of really strong builders in DeFi," Novakovski told Coinage. "Any of these strong decentralized projects should grow relative to more centralized exchanges."

It's a notable answer at a time when crypto traders have become obsessed with league tables. Hyperliquid has emerged as one of the biggest success stories of the cycle, generating billions in volume and proving that decentralized trading can compete with centralized exchanges on speed and user experience. But Novakovski argues that the market opportunity remains much larger than any one protocol — or token.

Over the last three months both Hyperliquid's native token and Lighter's have enjoyed nice rallies. HYPE is up more than 60% since March, while LIT has rallied by more than 40% over the same time frame. Arguably, Hyperliquid garnering attention for their version of a perpetual futures exchange has now also thrust Lighter into the spotlight.

The bigger question, he says, is whether decentralized infrastructure has finally matured enough to take meaningful market share from incumbents. And after spending more than three years building on Ethereum, he believes the answer is finally yes.

"We're only using 1% of Ethereum blob space," Novakovski said. "We can actually scale another 100x from here."

For years, Ethereum scaling lived largely in the realm of theory. Developers promised that rollups and zero-knowledge proofs would eventually unlock exchange-grade performance while preserving Ethereum's security guarantees. Today, Novakovski says those promises are becoming reality.

Lighter is processing billions of dollars in daily trading volume while settling on Ethereum infrastructure, something that would have seemed unrealistic only a few years ago.

"Theoretically we always talked about Nasdaq scale," he said. "I think the tech is a reality for that now."

That conviction is increasingly shared beyond crypto. According to Novakovski, some of the strongest interest in Ethereum's architecture is now coming from traditional finance institutions evaluating where tokenized assets might ultimately live.

"When they look at equities or fixed income — assets that are measured in many trillions of dollars — which security layer do you want to use to back that?" he said. "It's probably Ethereum."

The argument echoes a growing narrative across Wall Street. As tokenized stocks, bonds, and money market funds gain traction, institutions are beginning to focus less on transaction costs and more on settlement assurances. For Novakovski, Ethereum's decade-long operating history remains one of its biggest advantages.

That doesn't mean Lighter is simply betting on Ethereum's success alone. The company is also trying to differentiate itself through performance.

Novakovski pointed to recent studies showing Lighter outperforming competing decentralized exchanges on latency, an important metric for both professional traders and market makers.

"In some cases, actually, the price discovery, even relative to Binance, happens on Lighter," he said. That's a bold claim considering Binance remains the largest crypto exchange in the world. But the larger point is that decentralized exchanges are no longer competing solely on decentralization. They're increasingly competing on execution quality, speed, and market structure.

Those improvements are opening the door to products that extend beyond crypto itself. One of the more surprising examples is an index tracking H100 compute resources — the Nvidia chips powering much of today's artificial intelligence boom. Users can already trade an index market on Lighter.

"If you're building a fully autonomous agent, you can actually hedge the cost of your own compute on-chain," Novakovski said.

The example hints at a broader vision for where decentralized markets may be headed. For years, crypto has focused primarily on financial assets. Bitcoin, Ether, stablecoins, and more recently tokenized stocks. But as infrastructure improves, the universe of tradable assets could expand dramatically.

Compute resources. Prediction markets. Energy. Rent. Real-world business inputs.

The question shifts from whether something can be traded on-chain to whether it should. That's why Novakovski believes the future isn't simply about building a better crypto exchange. It's about building market infrastructure capable of supporting entirely new categories of economic activity.

Hyperliquid may currently dominate the conversation around decentralized trading. But if Novakovski is right, the next phase of competition won't be determined by who offers the most leverage or the flashiest token launch. It will be determined by who can build the foundations for a world where nearly everything becomes a market.

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