Key Takeaways
- Lighter becomes the second-largest perpetual trading DEX, only behind Hyperliquid.
- The growing trading volume comes despite the invite-only access to the platform.
- Hyperliquid is still the kind of DEX market, accounting for 80% of all perpetual trading volume.
Lighter, a relatively lesser-known DeFi protocol with an invite-only feature, climbed to the second spot with $5 billion in daily trading volume, trailing only Hyperliquid.
The Lighter DeFi protocol is a decentralized exchange (DEX) focused on perpetual futures trading, built as an application-specific zk-rollup on the Ethereum chain.
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Lighter Climbs the DEX Rankings
Lighter outpaced the likes of Jupiter, edgeX, dydx, Backpack, and more, making it one of the most preferred DEX platforms for leverage trading, ranking second.
Like Robinhood’s model, Lighter also offers zero trading fees for retail traders, enhancing profitability and attracting more users to the platform..
Lighter DEX is currently in a private beta phase, offering invite-only access on a first-come, first-served basis.
This exclusivity has further increased interest in the platform by fostering a sense of scarcity. To access the platform, users must first join Lighter’s Discord, pass verification, obtain an invitation code from the ref-codes channel, and connect a wallet to register.
The invite-only model has not hindered its growth; over 1,000 wallets reportedly join daily, indicating strong community interest.
Lighter uses zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups for high scalability and low-latency trading. It can process up to 10,000 orders per second and achieve 5 ms soft finality, significantly better than dYdX (1000ms) and Hyperliquid (70ms).
Growing DEX Dominance
Perpetual or leverage crypto trading was once the forte of centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Bybit. However, Hyperliquid’s DEX model broke the monopoly and now sees billions in daily trading volume, rivaling Binance.
Apart from Hyperliquid, Lighter has also seen its trading volume on the incline. Despite its invite-only status, Lighter has achieved significant trading volume, handling $2.84 billion in perpetual futures volume and holding $189.37 million in Total Value Locked (TVL), making it the number 2 perpetual DEX behind Hyperliquid ($12.17 billion).
Decentralized perpetual futures exchanges have seen rapid growth; in 2025, they accounted for 26% of all perpetual futures trade, up from 9% in the first half of 2024. With self-custody, transparency, and the quicker listing of new tokens, non-custodial platforms are becoming increasingly popular.
Centralized exchanges still dominate perpetual futures trading, handling $5.4 trillion in volume in Q1 2025 alone, with Binance commanding $2 trillion (37.5% market share).
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