Understanding the new Perp DEX star Lighter: From zero fees to innovative exploration of ZK technology, can it become the next Hyperliquid?

In the highly competitive track of perpetual contract exchanges, Lighter stands out with its unique zero-fee strategy and innovative ZK Rollup architecture. In just a few months, Lighter has attracted a large number of users and capital inflows, and its market capitalization and trading volume have grown steadily. However, will this project, which has been hailed as "the next Hyperliquid", continue to develop steadily, or will it be a bubble creation? This article will provide an in-depth analysis of Lighter's technical advantages, market performance, risks and challenges, and future prospects.

Project Introduction

Lighter is a decentralized exchange based on the Ethereum ecosystem that utilizes a Perptual Futures architecture powered by ZK Rollup technology. By combining zero-fee trading with innovative ZK technology, it aims to achieve efficient transparent verification while ensuring trading speed.

Core Positioning: Lighter, as an innovative Perptual Futures DEX, adopts a "centralized execution, decentralized verification" model, attempting to maintain a decentralized trust mechanism while engaging in high-frequency trading.

Technical Advantages: Based on ZK Rollup technology, Lighter achieves second-level transaction confirmation and ensures the fairness and transparency of each transaction through ZK proofs.

Capital Security Assurance: Adopts a dual-layer architecture (Layer 1 for asset custody, Layer 2 for executing trades), ensuring that even if the Layer 2 system fails, users' funds can be safely stored on the Ethereum mainnet.

Zero Fee Model: The biggest highlight of Lighter is that it completely exempts ordinary users from trading fees, attracting a large number of retail and novice traders.

Data and rise performance

Lighter has shown strong market growth momentum in the months following its launch.

Registered Users: As of September 2025, Lighter has over 56,000 registered users.

Locked-in (TVL) : increased rapidly from $2.5 million in March this year to $700 million, an increase of more than 280 times.

Daily Volume: The average daily trading volume has risen from hundreds of millions of dollars to about 8 billion dollars, with the trading volume reaching 18.9 billion dollars on September 25, 2025, close to Hyperliquid's market share.

However, it is worth noting that the total open interest (OI) of Lighter is only $1.3 billion, significantly lower than Hyperliquid's $13 billion. The lower OI may suggest that there is a lot of frequent short-term trading on the Lighter platform, warranting further attention to the authenticity of its trading data.

Expert Opinions and Market Analysis

Industry experts have different views on Lighter's technological innovation and market prospects.

ZK Technology Advantages: According to ZKSecurity's audit report, Lighter's zero-knowledge proof (ZK Proof) technology can effectively ensure the fairness and transparency of each transaction. This technological advantage provides a trustworthy guarantee for its decentralized exchange model.

Volume authenticity: However, some on-chain analysts have pointed out that the trading volume on the Lighter platform may contain a large amount of "wash trading," especially due to its zero-fee policy, which has made this behavior more common. There are users in the community who have reported that some large users frequently trade through self-controlled accounts in hopes of obtaining future airdrop rewards.

Competitive Landscape and Comparison

As an emerging ZK Rollup architecture perpetual DEX, Lighter is often compared with the two major platforms Hyperliquid and Aster.

Architecture and Decentralization: Hyperliquid adopts a customized Layer 1 architecture, theoretically possessing decentralized characteristics, but in practice, the number of nodes is limited, resulting in a lower degree of decentralization. In contrast, Aster enhances performance through off-chain matching, sacrificing some decentralized features. Lighter's innovation lies in centralizing trade execution on Layer 2, managed by a single Sequencer, but ensuring a decentralized verification process through ZK Proof to validate transactions.

Performance and Trading Experience: Hyperliquid remains stable during high volume trading, and its trading pairs have very deep Depth. Lighter ensures trading efficiency through second-level matching and sub-second ZK Proof generation, although there may be slight lags in extreme situations, the overall trading experience is close to that of centralized exchanges. Aster's performance is weaker, limited by the 3-second block time of the BNB chain, resulting in a relatively poor trading experience.

Risks and Challenges

Despite Lighter showing strong growth momentum, it still faces multiple potential risks.

Brushing risk: Although the zero-fee model can attract a large number of retail investors, it is also easy to cause "brushing" behavior, which affects the authenticity of transaction data. Especially on the Lighter platform, there is a large number of short-term frequent transactions.

Questionable business model: While Lighter generates revenue through premium account rates and API payments, its long-term monetization model is unclear. The commission-free strategy may lead to higher spreads and increase the actual transaction cost for users.

Systemic Risk: The LLP mechanism introduced by the Lighter plan allows users to use LP shares as margin to participate in trading. This "one money, multiple uses" design carries systemic risk. If the market experiences severe fluctuations, the LLP may incur losses, which could trigger a chain of liquidations.

Market Outlook and Valuation Speculation

The future development of Lighter will depend on whether it can maintain its current growth momentum, especially whether there is real market demand behind the high volume.

Revenue Estimate: Assuming that Lighter's future stable daily trading volume is 4 billion USD, with 20% of the trades coming from paying users and an average transaction fee rate of 0.01%. The annualized revenue would be approximately 30 million USD.

Valuation Forecast: Based on the current volume and revenue model, Lighter's future valuation could reach $1.2 billion. Given the market's enthusiasm for high-performance Orderbook DEX, Lighter's listing valuation could exceed $2 billion.

Conclusion

As an innovative Perpetual Futures exchange, Lighter has quickly attracted market attention with its zero fees and ZK Rollup technology, demonstrating strong growth in a short period. However, challenges such as wash trading, the sustainability of its business model, and systemic risks still exist. Whether Lighter can continue to lead the market in the future or will fade into obscurity after the hype is something investors should keep a close eye on.