What is Lighter?

Lighter matches perpetual futures on a central limit order book, the way a centralized exchange does, but it runs as a zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum. It generates ZK proofs for every operation, order matching and liquidations included, and those proofs are verified publicly on Ethereum. Standard accounts pay 0% maker and 0% taker fees. Premium accounts pay 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker, less with LIT staked.

Funding is paid every hour, directly between longs and shorts. Lighter averages the premium over the index across the hour and pulls it toward a base interest rate, and one eighth of the result is paid, capped at 0.5% an hour. The base is 0.01% per 8 hours on most markets. On the Robinhood Chain exchange, stock, commodity and pre-IPO books listed 0.0032% per 8 hours when we checked in September 2026, about 3.5% a year while the premium stays small. Lighter's docs also give the premium half its usual weight on real-world asset markets and a hundredth on pre-IPO ones.

On July 1, 2026, the day Robinhood Chain's mainnet opened, Lighter launched a separate instance built for that chain, with USDG as the quote asset. Robinhood Wallet sends perps there for eligible users; the US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, UAE and Singapore are excluded. Its books carry stock and ETF perps, pre-IPO names such as OpenAI, gold, silver and the big crypto markets. They are not the books of Lighter's main exchange, so prices and funding can differ between the two.

Say Lighter quotes a stock perp at 0.02% per 8 hours and Hyperliquid quotes the same stock at 0.005%. Annualized without compounding that is 21.9% against about 5.5%, a gap of roughly 16 points. A long on Lighter pays the higher rate. Whether the gap survives fees on the other leg and the next few hourly resets is a separate question.

Also called: Lighter DEX, Lighter exchange.

The Robinhood perps widget reads Lighter's Robinhood Chain instance: stock, pre-IPO, commodity and crypto perps plus USDG spot books, with open interest, a 24 hour range bar and funding set against Hyperliquid and Binance. Perps risk reads Lighter's main exchange instead and sets its BTC, ETH and SOL funding and its total open interest beside the other perp venues.

• Robinhood perps
• Perps risk

• Official sitelighter.xyz
• Official documentationdocs.lighter.xyz

• Perp DEX
• Pre-IPO perps
• Stock perps
• Funding rate
• Robinhood Chain
• USDG