The perpetuals race has a new entrant in open beta. Lighter has opened its public mainnet after roughly eight months in private testing, positioning itself as an Ethereum-settled alternative to the current leaders.

Under the hood, Lighter is a zk-rollup purpose-built for perps. A centralized sequencer batches orders, but state transitions — price-time-priority matching, liquidations, funding and risk checks — are verified by custom zero-knowledge circuits. Ethereum smart contracts custody user funds, track the canonical state root, and advance state only after a proof verifies on L1. If the sequencer stalls or censors, users can submit priority operations on-chain or exit via an emergency “Desert Mode” that relies on Ethereum data.

That security posture contrasts with Hyperliquid, which runs its own layer-1 secured by its validator set, and with Aster, which currently operates on BNB Chain as a smart-contract. Lighter’s pitch: centralized-style performance, with settlement and finality anchored to Ethereum and fairness enforced by zk proofs.

Lighter is also diverging on fees. Retail traders using the front end pay no trading fees, while API and high-frequency flow is charged. The team says it has enabled automated rules to deter wash-trading and Sybil activity, an attempt to keep points farming from dominating behavior.

By the team’s count, private beta usage reached ~188,000 unique accounts and ~50,000 daily activities. With the public launch, Lighter is starting Season 2 of its points program, which it says is planned to run through the end of 2025. Market watchers naturally read that as a prelude to a token, although the project has not announced any token details.

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The launch was heralded by several prominent founders building on Ethereum, including Eigenlayer’s Sreeram Kannan and LayerZero’s Bryan Pellegrino.

The near-term test is whether Lighter can convert flavor-of-the-moment attention into durable open interest and fee revenue — areas where Hyperliquid still leads — while its Ethereum-anchored architecture becomes a deciding factor for capital that prioritizes provable fairness and exit guarantees.

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