Perpetual contract exchange Lighter, during its Q3 investor call, revealed strong growth momentum through founder and CEO Vlad Novakovski, with its core strategy shifting from purely crypto-native trading toward penetrating traditional finance (RWA) users, and confirmed it will submit dual license applications next month to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for a Designated Contract Market (DCM) and a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO).
The Q3 performance showed rising volume and price, with total trading volume reaching $137.67 billion, a figure that not only solidified its leading position in the industry but also validated improved user stickiness through significant expansion in open interest. As of September 30, total open interest across Lighter Core and Lighter Robinhood doubled quarter-over-quarter, surpassing $1.6 billion. This growth was not evenly distributed but was strongly driven by the newly integrated Robinhood (HOOD.US) partnership business, which contributed $17.8 billion in trading volume within just one quarter of launch, becoming the key engine driving the overall scale leap. Meanwhile, Lighter Core's account count recently surpassed 1 million, marking a major milestone for its user base since its mainnet launch in October 2025 and providing a solid user foundation for subsequent product iterations.
A deeper analysis of the internal structure of the Robinhood partnership business reveals a user profile significantly different from Lighter Core. Data compiled by Woofun AI shows that this business line had approximately 40,000 accounts in Q3, with RWA (real-world asset) related positions accounting for as much as 70%, forming a strong complement to Lighter Core's positioning of primarily attracting crypto-native traders. In terms of revenue contribution, total revenue for the full quarter was $8.55 million, with Lighter Core holding a dominant 87% share, though the growth rate of the Robinhood business cannot be ignored. Based on a 50% revenue-sharing mechanism, by the end of Q3, more than $1 million in fees had flowed back to Lighter, and the Robinhood business's open interest had rapidly climbed to $454 million. This user segmentation strategy allows Lighter to simultaneously capture two distinct types of liquidity: on one end, crypto-native users seeking high leverage and complex strategies; on the other, broader investors entering through Robinhood Wallet who prefer RWA assets, thereby achieving scale effects exceeding most competitors within just one quarter.
Optimization of technical infrastructure is the underlying logic supporting the above business expansion. In Q3, Lighter achieved a cliff-edge drop in ZK proof costs through the combination of open-source community and AI technology. The team launched a public challenge encouraging developers to use AI to optimize its ZK prover, ultimately reducing overall generation costs by more than 50%, with efficiency improved by 3 to 4 times particularly at the circuit and business logic levels. This technological breakthrough was directly reflected in block production performance, with average block proof time compressed from over 5 minutes to 1 minute, a reduction of 81%, greatly improving the latency issue in trading experience. Additionally, Lighter open-sourced the client-side foundational framework and SDK, allowing third-party developers to directly reuse its state and core trading infrastructure. This open strategy not only lowered the barrier to ecosystem building but also accumulated necessary development resources and partners for the subsequent EVM mainnet launch.
On the product roadmap, Lighter is accelerating EVM compatibility and derivatives enrichment. The Lighter EVM mainnet is planned to launch before year-end, with its core advantage being the ability to achieve synchronous reading, asynchronous transfers, and order management with Lighter Core without cross-chain bridges, with all ZK settlements ultimately completed on Ethereum. Through collaboration with Axiom, Lighter EVM further optimized performance on the basis of the beta version, enabling support for more complex application scenarios. In the derivatives space, binary options launched this week, while more complex vanilla options (including calls, puts, and European options) will also be introduced before year-end. The refinement of this product matrix aims to cover the full spectrum of trading needs from linear exposure to volatility strategies, providing institutional users with more hedging and arbitrage tools while also offering retail investors richer yield enhancement methods.
To support the operation of complex products such as options, Lighter will introduce a unified risk engine to achieve portfolio margin management across spot, perpetual contracts, and options. This mechanism allows collateral sharing within accounts and calculates worst-case losses based on the hedging relationships of the same asset across different products, thereby significantly reducing margin requirements. For example, a position that buys a call option while shorting a perpetual contract would require significantly less margin due to its natural hedging properties. This professional risk control design not only improves the capital efficiency of market makers, enabling them to narrow quote spreads and provide deeper order books, but also allows retail investors to participate in complex strategies at lower cost, thereby enhancing overall market liquidity and depth.
Regulatory compliance is the core strategic focus of Lighter's next phase, with the goal of opening up the broad institutional market by obtaining U.S. licenses. Vlad Novakovski revealed that since attending the first meeting of the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee in August, the team has maintained close communication with the Chairman's office and various regulatory departments, focusing on topics such as perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and AI agent trading. Lighter plans to formally submit the dual DCM and DCO license applications next month, where DCM involves market operation standards such as order book management, and DCO covers clearing mechanisms such as forced liquidation. Currently, Lighter has completed preliminary alignment with the DCM's 23 core principles and the DCO's 18 core principles, with many on-chain native architectures already able to directly meet regulatory requirements, and the remaining parts to be addressed through innovative implementation methods in consensus with regulators. According to the process, the CFTC has a review period of up to 180 days, and given sufficient prior communication, the prospects for approval are relatively optimistic.
In terms of token economics and ecosystem building, Lighter insists on using 100% of trading revenue to repurchase and burn LIT tokens to offset inflation pressure and reward holders. By the end of Q3, cumulative repurchases had exceeded 18 million LIT, of which 2.45 million were repurchased in Q3 alone. Currently, burned tokens account for more than 7% of the initial 250 million LIT supply, with another 109.8 million LIT in staking. Regarding token unlocks, following a 36-month linear unlock plan, the first unlock is scheduled for January 29 next year, and the team is actively communicating with long-term shareholders and introducing strategic investors to mitigate supply shocks. At the ecosystem level, 124 projects are already building on Lighter, covering 12 categories including data, applications, terminals, and AI agents. With the EVM mainnet approaching, this ecosystem map is expected to further expand, forming a more complete closed-loop system.
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