Lighter is moving fast. The Ethereum-based decentralized perpetuals exchange is rolling out spot ETH trading, building on the momentum of its breakout mainnet debut.
The platform began with Ethereum transfers on Thursday and plans to open additional spot markets in the coming days.
After launching in private beta in January and going public on mainnet in October, Lighter has quickly emerged as one of the largest on-chain perpetuals exchanges. It now stands as one of the few credible rivals to Hyperliquid. In October alone, Lighter processed $272.5 billion in trading volume, closing in on Hyperliquid’s $308.5 billion and edging past Aster’s $259 billion.
The momentum carried into November. According to data online, Lighter became the most active perps protocol by volume, posting $292.5 billion in trades. The move into spot trading marks the latest expansion in a busy few weeks for the project.
Recently, Lighter launched equities perpetuals starting with COIN and Robinhood, expanded its foreign exchange markets, and pushed into real-world assets through a Chainlink integration. The team first teased spot trading in late November, actively gathering feedback from testnet users before flipping the switch.
In crypto, spot markets remain a smaller slice of the action. Derivatives dominate trading activity, much like in traditional finance. On-chain perpetual volumes hit a record $1.2 trillion in October, fueled by a major liquidation event and the rise of platforms like Lighter and Binance-incubated Aster.
Still, offering both spot and derivatives is a familiar playbook. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are also leaning harder into derivatives this year. Lighter’s edge comes from its architecture. The exchange runs as an application-specific zk-rollup on Ethereum, prioritizing performance without sacrificing security.
Founder Vladimir Novakovski, a former Citadel quant and Olympiad medalist, has been vocal about choosing a DEX-focused layer-2 over building a standalone layer-1 like Hyperliquid. Ethereum’s security guarantees, he argues, offer a stronger foundation for long-term growth.
Hyperliquid, launched in 2023, proved that on-chain perps DEXs can scale. Its growth accelerated after the debut of its HYPE token and HyperEVM in November 2024, though its monthly volumes still sit at roughly a tenth of Binance’s.
Investor interest in Lighter reflects the momentum. In November, Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital led a $68 million funding round valuing the project at $1.5 billion, underscoring growing confidence in decentralized derivatives and the next generation of on-chain exchanges.
