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The U.S. finally has perps, but only for centralized exchanges. That may feel like just half a step, but it buys us time to work out which onchain platforms are best positioned to capture an entirely new asset class as it lands on Wall Street.
Hyperliquid's the obvious one, and by no means a bad play. But the first onchain protocol to break ground in the U.S. probably won't be one operated out of Asia. To me, it has to come from inside the country…
...which brings us to Lighter.
Will Price, a DeFi investor and Lighter advisor, and Flip, who covers perps at Delphi Digital, came on Bankless to make the case: LIT, Lighter's token, is underpriced for what the team has built and how cleanly it lines up with where Wall Street and U.S. regulation are heading.
The Market-Maker Flywheel
One of Lighter's more interesting advantages over 
Hyperliquid is how it uses market makers.
The prize every exchange chases is uninformed retail flow, the benign volume that made Robinhood and Kalshi so profitable, because it's easy money for whoever trades against it. I regret to inform you that most of us are that uninformed flow.
Rather than charging retail fees, Lighter instead charges market makers for access to trade against it and uses that revenue to let everyone else open and close positions for free.
Where Wall Street Plugs In
Increasingly, the assets people most want to trade are real-world ones, stocks, pre-IPO names, and commodities, rather than crypto.
To get traders better prices on those, Lighter added a Request-for-Quote (RFQ) system that lets large market makers quote on demand instead of parking capital on the book. Traders get better fills on markets that would otherwise sit thin, and market makers get to quote them without tying up capital they'd rather use elsewhere.
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That same plumbing could eventually let large offchain institutions plug in and quote specific assets, drawn by the same retail flow. If that happens, Lighter stops competing with Wall Street's liquidity and starts merging with it, while the end user still trades for free.
Technicals and Fundamentals
On the technicals, Lighter stands tall. Its orderbook architecture runs at the lowest latency in crypto perps, around 200 milliseconds, matching or slightly exceeding Hyperliquid's speed.
Pairing that orderbook with the RFQ system also made it the first exchange to run more than one execution model at once, which Flip argues is what any venue will eventually need to capture the whole perps market, not just the crypto segment.
The fundamentals hold up just as well. Lighter routes all of its revenue into buying LIT back off the open market, buybacks Flip expects to grow as the exchange starts charging market makers more. And despite already doing about a fifth of Hyperliquid's crypto volume, LIT still trades at just 20 to 25 times revenue against Hyperliquid's 70.
Additionally, over the past quarter Lighter has been buying back LIT at more than nearly 4x the pace of Hyperliquid buying back HYPE.
Reading the Tea Leaves
The same strength on display in its technicals and fundamentals shows up in its business strategy.
Lighter listed a SpaceX pre-IPO market two weeks before Hyperliquid did, and beat it to a market for Nvidia's H100s, the AI chips everyone's scrambling for. It's already listed names like Dell and IBM, the stocks everyone’s hot for in the past few weeks, once again, ahead of Hyperliquid.
Then there's the positioning. When regulators do open perps to onchain protocols, the first through the door will likely be the ones the U.S. can actually oversee, which means those based domestically.
Lighter is a U.S. company, with LIT issued straight out of a Delaware C-corp and the platform settling in USDC, a GENIUS-compliant stablecoin. It's built to be ready the exact moment that door opens.
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