In the hype of the incentive bubble, who will pay for the false prosperity of the Lighter community?

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

Recently, the name Lighter has been flooding the community discussions, whether it’s valuation debates, points farming yield calculations, TGE timing guesses, or pre-market price fluctuations, the sentiment is unusually intense.

Binance, OKX, and other exchanges have announced the launch of pre-market trading for the LIT token. Polymarket’s prediction market shows a greater than 50% chance that its valuation will exceed $3 billion after TGE. On-chain transfer signals of 250 million LIT tokens further ignite FOMO sentiment, making everything seem logical. Undoubtedly, Lighter is one of the most anticipated projects in the crypto market at year-end.

However, while everyone is calculating how many LIT they can exchange points for or how much it will rise after TGE, a more fundamental question is being overlooked: how much of this airdrop frenzy reflects real growth, and how much is just a short-lived illusion of an incentive bubble? Does the Perp DEX track truly have sustainable value?

Valuation Anchors and Zero-Fee Trap

In the fierce competition of the Perp DEX track in 2025, Lighter has taken a different expansion path. Compared to Hyperliquid, which broke through with extreme operational capabilities and a fair narrative without VC backing, and Aster, which relies on Binance ecosystem brand premium, Lighter chooses to deeply embrace top-tier capital.

According to RootData, Lighter completed a $68 million funding round in November, led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital, with Robinhood participating. Its pre-TGE valuation has reached $1.5 billion, with backing from established institutions like Dragonfly and Haun Ventures prior to that.

From a financial perspective, Defillama shows that Lighter’s open interest (OI) has reached $1.572 billion, with monthly revenue of $10.27 million, and annualized revenue approaching $125 million. In trading volume, Lighter recorded $227.19 billion over the past 30 days, surpassing the track benchmarks Hyperliquid ($175.05 billion) and Aster ($189.034 billion), once being regarded as a dark horse in this year’s perp DEX scene.

Market analysis suggests that Lighter’s ambitions go far beyond a simple perpetual contract exchange. It aims to build decentralized trading infrastructure, connecting brokerages, fintech companies, and professional market makers. On the retail side, Lighter adopts a Robinhood-like “zero fee” strategy, but with a 200-300 millisecond delay, creating an excellent arbitrage window for high-frequency market makers. Ordinary retail traders attracted by “low fees” may avoid explicit fees but could pay several times the normal trading costs due to hidden slippage.

Therefore, there is some controversy over its business model, and its valuation logic extends beyond a simple comparison within the Perp DEX dimension. Although Polymarket shows its post-TGE valuation expectation in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion, whether it can sustain a long-term institutional narrative remains uncertain.

On the other hand, historical experience repeatedly proves that “going live at the peak” has become an inescapable fate for star VC projects. Data from 2025 shows that high-profile “VC-backed projects” in the secondary market often have valuations that are severely disconnected. For example, Humanity Protocol, valued at $1 billion by VCs, now has a market cap of about $285 million; Fuel Network is around $11 million; Bubblemaps is about $6 million, with gaps of dozens of times. Other projects like Plasmas and DoubleZero also only have market caps of 10% to 30% of their VC valuations.

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

The False Prosperity of Prep DEX

Lighter’s ongoing concerns essentially reflect the deep bottlenecks of the entire Perp DEX track.

First, the core user base of Perp DEX should be leveraged traders and institutional arbitrageurs, but actual activity is far below the narrative. According to DeFiLlama, even in October, when the entire track’s monthly trading volume hit a record high of $1.2 trillion, the number of truly active addresses (users with directional positions daily) remained in the ten-thousand to hundred-thousand range. Compared to CEXs like Binance and Bybit with hundreds of millions of users, there is a huge gap.

The reason is that users choose DEXs mainly for lower fees and on-chain privacy, but most retail traders’ funds are not highly sensitive to privacy. Moreover, with Hyperliquid establishing a deep liquidity moat through its own Layer 1, it is difficult for new entrants to break through on the same level.

The limited user base leads to the track’s growth heavily relying on “temporary farmers” rather than loyal users. CoinGecko reports that by the end of 2025, airdrop farming was prevalent, with users mainly aiming to earn points rather than long-term trading, resulting in retention rates halving after TGE. For example, Lighter’s Season 2 attracted over 500,000 new users, but analysis shows 80% of these are multi-wallet Sybil accounts, and the number of truly active addresses is far less impressive.

Second, the awkward state of the track is reflected in a “short-term cycle” created by multi-party利益博弈: project teams urgently need TVL and trading volume to support valuation narratives, using points and zero fees to induce flow; VCs bet on high valuations seeking exits; farmers swarm to farm points, cash out the airdrops, and leave.

Forklog’s analysis states that although the “interest roulette” boosts on-paper data, it is essentially a short-term game among all parties, not a win-win for the ecosystem. A typical case is Aster, which in November 2025 adjusted its points multiplier, causing 400,000 wallets to quickly migrate to Lighter, directly leading to gas fee surges and platform depth collapse.

BitMEX CEO Stephan Lutz warned that the hype around Perp DEX might be unsustainable because CEXs still control 95% of open interest (OI). The DEX model overly relies on incentives, making its business logic extremely fragile. A mid-2025 report from 21Shares also emphasized that although the market share of Perp DEX increased from 5% at the start of the year to 26%, this growth driven by bullish sentiment is accompanied by severe fragmentation and competition.

Additionally, the apparent trading volume explosion of Perp DEX is driven by users motivated by points incentives. By the end of 2025, the hotness of tokenless Perp DEX airdrops and mining surged, which explains why Lighter and Aster both saw monthly trading volumes surpassing $180 billion. Although Aster has issued tokens, it must sustain on-going rewards to maintain on-paper growth, effectively “subsidizing retention” at the expense of future prospects.

It has been proven that the glamorous appearance created by capital and maintained by points often faces brutal valuation corrections after TGE. Looking back at projects like Vana, backed by top-tier VCs, their FDV briefly skyrocketed after 2024 TGE but then was cut by 70% due to loss of incentives, quickly becoming liquidity-starved “ghost projects.” The current data surges of Lighter and Aster are similar to these overvalued VC projects.

In the current market landscape, the head effect of Perp DEX has basically been established. Hyperliquid, with its early-mover advantage, internal revenue, and depth, remains in the lead, while other players can only seek differentiation through mobile optimization, insurance mechanisms, or RWA integration in narrow niche tracks.

Ultimately, the Perp DEX track is still in a stock game phase. For small retail traders with low privacy sensitivity, DEXs still lack enough motivation to migrate. Beneath the surface of excitement, the real value may be far less than what the data shows.

Conclusion

In the prosperity logic woven by points, VCs, and airdrops, Perp DEX seems to fall into a self-sustaining illusion. However, when the subsidy tide recedes, those “dark horses” lacking genuine user stickiness and only supported by capital narratives will eventually reveal their true nature under secondary market liquidity tests.

Lighter’s story continues, but it reminds crypto investors that DeFi is never short of lively spectacles—what’s missing is the truth that can withstand the bubble. When chasing the next highlight moment, it’s wise to ask yourself: who is this frenzy really for?