It is pure and simple market competition, therefore absolutely normal and, to be honest, even healthy for users, but it could also have some negative repercussions.
Everything started with the enormous success of Hyperliquid, which was naturally followed by the market entry of competitors such as Aster and indeed Lighter.
Lighter: the perp DEX of the moment
Lighter is indeed a DEX that allows trading of perpetual futures.
It is built on an Ethereum layer 2 with zero-knowledge (ZK) technology. It is an innovative platform that combines the fast performance and efficiency of a centralized exchange with the security and transparency of DeFi, ensuring that every trade, order matching, and settlement is publicly verifiable thanks to ZK-SNARKs proofs.
One of its strengths is its high performance, as it is capable of processing tens of thousands of orders per second, with latency of only a few milliseconds, thus reducing slippage and delays typical of traditional DEXs.
Furthermore, regular retail traders can use it without paying fees, because the monetization model focuses on high-frequency institutional traders. It is possible that this is the reason for its recent boom.
It is also equipped with a Lighter Liquidity Pool (LLP) for market-making that allows users to earn yield by providing liquidity, similar to HLP of Hyperliquid.
It also offers weekly rewards on active trading, with a potential airdrop of the LIGHT token for early adopters.
Being a DEX, users retain full ownership and control of their funds, with final settlement on Ethereum to ensure atomicity and verifiability.
It was launched in January of this year, and it transitioned to the public mainnet only in this same month of October.
Lighter overtakes Aster and Hyperliquid
Hyperliquid is based on its own proprietary Layer-1, initially launched in 2023. It is therefore a DEX launched well before Lighter, and was the very first to capture public attention among those that allow perpetual futures trading.
Aster instead arrived much later, in September of this year, right in the wake of the enormous success of Hyperliquid. However, it is a platform born from the merger between APX Finance (active since 2021) and Astherus (active since the end of 2024). It is a project supported by Binance, and its platform is based on a Layer-2 on BNB Chain.
Lighter therefore seems a bit more similar to Aster, compared to Hyperliquid, but these are purely technical differences, because in the market they are 100% competitors.
According to DefiLlama data, Lighter has surpassed both Hyperliquid and Aster in trading volumes over the past 24 hours.
Regarding the last 30 days, Hyperliquid is still leading, with Lighter in second place and Aster slightly behind, but it should not be forgotten that Lighter’s mainnet was launched less than a month ago.
It should be noted, however, that the Open Interest of Lighter is still much lower than that of Hyperliquid and Aster.
In fact, Hyperliquid has an Open Interest exceeding 9.3 billion dollars, compared to 3.3 of Aster and less than 1.8 billion of Lighter. However, regarding volumes, Aster in the last seven days is above 73 billion dollars, compared to nearly 70 of Lighter and 58 of Hyperliquid.
The differences between Lighter, Aster, and Hyperliquid
This latest curious discrepancy allows for the detection of some differences in particular between Lighter, Hyperliquid, and Aster.
Hyperliquid is obviously a much more mature market, with greater organic liquidity. Instead, Lighter, and probably Aster to some extent, bases its success primarily on temporary incentives.
In general, professional and institutional traders prefer the depth of the order book and the liquidity of Hyperliquid, while the aggressive incentives of Lighter mainly attract retail traders.
Furthermore, Hyperliquid dominates among high-frequency traders (HFT), as well as among institutional traders like prop firms, because having large open positions requires them to rely on greater liquidity and deeper order books.
Lighter instead mainly attracts the so-called low-frequency traders, that is, traders who conduct far fewer transactions, and with slightly longer timeframes.
Additionally, there is a risk that Lighter’s success may ultimately be somewhat too dependent on aggressive incentives, therefore once these incentives end, there is a risk of a partial migration of its liquidity towards other more solid and resilient DEXs.
