Who will pay for the false prosperity of the Lighters?

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Recently, the name Lighter has been making waves in the community, whether it's discussions about valuation, yield calculations for liquidity farming, or speculations about TGE timing and pre-market price fluctuations, the sentiment is exceptionally strong.

Exchanges like Binance and OKX have successively announced the launch of pre-market trading for the LIT token. The Polymarket prediction market shows that the probability of its post-TGE valuation exceeding $3 billion is over 50%. The on-chain signal of 250 million LIT tokens being transferred has ignited FOMO sentiment completely, and everything seems to fall into place. Lighter is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated projects in the crypto market by the end of the year.

However, while everyone is calculating how many LIT tokens can be exchanged for points and how much the price will rise after TGE, a more fundamental question has been pushed aside: how much of this airdrop frenzy represents real growth, and how much is merely a fleeting illusion of incentive bubbles? Does the Perp DEX track truly possess sustainable value?

Valuation Anchors and the Zero Fee Trap

In the fierce competition of the Perp DEX track in 2025, Lighter has carved out a unique expansion path. Compared to Hyperliquid, which breaks through with extreme operational capabilities and a fair narrative without VC backing, and Aster, which enjoys brand premium backed by the Binance ecosystem, Lighter has chosen to deeply embrace top-tier capital.

According to RootData, Lighter completed a massive $68 million financing round in November this year, led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Robinhood, and its Pre-TGE valuation has reached as high as $1.5 billion. Prior to this, established institutions like Dragonfly and Haun Ventures had already endorsed it.

From a financial metrics perspective, Defillama shows that Lighter's open interest (OI) has reached $1.572 billion, with monthly revenue of $10.27 million, and an annualized revenue nearing $125 million. In terms of trading volume, Lighter recorded $227.19 billion in the past 30 days, even surpassing the benchmark of the track, Hyperliquid ($175.05 billion) and Aster ($189.03 billion), and was once recognized by the market as a dark horse in this year's Perp DEX.

Market analysis suggests that Lighter's ambitions extend far beyond being a simple perpetual contract exchange; it aims to build decentralized trading infrastructure, intending to connect brokers, fintech companies, and professional market makers. On the retail side, Lighter implements a "zero-fee" strategy similar to Robinhood, but it has a latency of 200-300 milliseconds, which undoubtedly creates an excellent arbitrage window for high-frequency market makers. Ordinary retail investors attracted by "low fees" may avoid explicit transaction fees but could end up paying several times the normal trading costs due to implicit slippage.

As a result, there is some controversy regarding its business model, and its valuation logic exceeds simple comparisons within the Perp DEX dimension. Although Polymarket indicates that its post-TGE valuation expectation falls within the range of $2 billion to $3 billion, whether it can support a long-term institutional narrative remains a question mark.

On the other hand, historical experience has repeatedly proven that "launching is peak" has become an inescapable fate for star VC projects. Data from 2025 shows that high-profile "VC-backed projects" have seriously disconnected performance and valuation in the secondary market. For example, the Humanity Protocol, valued at $1 billion by VCs, currently has a market cap of about $285 million, Fuel Network is around $11 million, and Bubblemaps is about $6 million, with discrepancies reaching dozens of times. Other projects like Plasmas and DoubleZero also have market caps remaining at only 10% to 30% of their VC valuations.

In the face of "vanity metrics" driven by capital, Lighter may just be the next case.

The False Prosperity of Perp DEX

The ongoing concerns about Lighter essentially reflect the deep-seated bottlenecks of the entire Perp DEX track.

Firstly, the core user group of Perp DEX should ideally be leveraged traders and institutional arbitrageurs, but in reality, the activity level is far inferior to the narrative. According to DeFiLlama data, even when the entire track's monthly trading volume hit a historical high of $1.2 trillion in October, the number of globally active addresses (defined as effective users with directional positions daily) only maintained a scale of tens of thousands to a hundred thousand, which presents a significant gap compared to the hundreds of millions of users on CEX platforms like Binance and Bybit.

The reason lies in the fact that while users choose DEX for low fees and on-chain privacy, most retail investors' capital sizes are not highly sensitive to privacy. Moreover, as the frontrunner Hyperliquid establishes a deep liquidity moat with its self-built Layer 1, new players find it challenging to break through in the same dimension.

The limitation of the user base leads to the track's growth being highly reliant on "temporary farmers" rather than loyal users. A CoinGecko report pointed out that by the end of 2025, airdrop interactions (Airdrop Farming) became prevalent, with users flocking in mostly to earn points rather than for long-term trading, resulting in retention rates generally halving after TGE (token generation). For instance, while Lighter's Season 2 attracted over 500,000 new users, analysis shows that 80% were multi-wallet Sybil (witch) accounts, and the number of truly active addresses is far less impressive than it appears.

Secondly, the awkward state of the track is reflected in the "short-term cycle" formed by the interests of multiple parties: project parties urgently need TVL and trading volume to support valuation narratives, inducing traffic through points and zero fees; VCs bet on high valuations seeking exits; while farmers rush to score points and cash out after airdrops.

Forklog analysis states that while the "interest roulette" has inflated the surface data, it is essentially a short-term game among parties, rather than an ecological win-win. A typical case is Aster, which saw 400,000 wallets quickly migrate to Lighter after adjusting its point multiplier in November 2025, directly leading to a surge in gas fees and a collapse in platform depth.

BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz warned that the Perp DEX craze may be difficult to sustain, as CEX still controls 95% of the open interest (OI) share, and the DEX model overly relies on incentive mechanisms, making its business logic extremely fragile. A mid-2025 report from 21Shares also emphasized that although the Perp DEX market share rose from 5% at the beginning of the year to 26%, this share growth driven by bullish market sentiment is accompanied by severe fragmented competition.

Additionally, the apparent explosion in trading volume for Perp DEX is a product of users being incentivized by points. By the end of 2025, the airdrop mining craze for non-token Perp DEX surged, which also explains why both Lighter and Aster's monthly trading volumes could exceed $180 billion. Although Aster has issued tokens, it has to rely on continuous reward activities to maintain surface growth, and the model of "subsidizing for retention" is akin to overdrawing the future.

It has been proven that the gloss created by capital and maintained by points often faces brutal valuation corrections after TGE. Looking back at similar projects backed by top VCs like Vana, although its FDV surged briefly after TGE in 2024, it subsequently halved by 70% due to the loss of incentive support, quickly devolving into a "ghost project" with depleted liquidity. The current data frenzy of Lighter and Aster mirrors the paths of these VC projects with valuation discrepancies.

In the current market landscape, the head effect of Perp DEX has basically solidified, with Hyperliquid firmly holding the top position due to its early revenue and depth, while remaining players can only seek differentiated survival in extremely narrow sub-tracks such as mobile optimization, insurance mechanisms, or RWA integration.

Ultimately, the Perp DEX track is still in a stage of stock game, and for small retail investors with low sensitivity to privacy, DEX still lacks sufficient migratory motivation. Beneath its surface bustle, the real value may be far more pale than the data suggests.

Conclusion

In the prosperous logic woven by points, VCs, and airdrops, Perp DEX seems to have fallen into a self-sustaining illusion. However, when the tide of subsidies recedes, those "dark horses" lacking real user stickiness and relying solely on capital narratives will ultimately reveal their true forms in the liquidity test of the secondary market.

The story of Lighter continues, but it reminds crypto investors that the DeFi track has never lacked for lively feasts; what it lacks is the truth that can withstand the bubble. In chasing the next highlight moment, it may be wise to ask oneself: who is this celebration really for?

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