#ETF与衍生品 Seeing the fierce battle between Lighter and Hyperliquid, I was reminded of the exchange wars of 2017. Back then, every new player claimed they would overthrow Binance, but what happened?

This time is a bit different. I’ve carefully analyzed Lighter’s logic, and it’s indeed more complex than it appears on the surface. The behind-the-scenes "use money to buy time" model of zero fees is essentially moving Robinhood’s order flow business onto the chain—300 milliseconds of latency is almost imperceptible to retail traders but leaves arbitrage opportunities for market makers and institutions. This tactic is widely used in traditional finance, but no one has really done it on-chain with DEXs before.

The key is the architecture of "bridge-free cross-chain" combined with "universal full-warehouse margin." It allows users to directly use stETH to earn staking rewards and serve as collateral—something Hyperliquid simply can’t do because it’s on its own L1 and can’t directly tap into mainnet liquidity. From a security perspective, Lighter, as an Ethereum L2, is indeed more robust than a standalone application chain.

But I have to be honest: I’ve seen too many projects with huge contrasts before and after TGE. Hyperliquid has survived until today because it managed to organically grow trading volume after the decline of incentive rewards—that’s real skill. Lighter is hot right now, but once airdrops are unlocked and VC tokens are released, whether liquidity can be retained will be another story.

This isn’t about who is stronger, Lighter or Hyperliquid, but rather that the real door to the on-chain derivatives market has just begun to open. Perp DEXs will fight to snatch market share from centralized exchanges, not because one product is smarter, but because the ecosystem can generate positive feedback. I’m looking forward to seeing if this can become a reality by the end of the year, and also curious about what will happen next year.