Written by: Ma He, Foresight News
On June 18th, Lighter's token LIT broke through $1.9, reaching a new high since January of this year. Its current market cap is $425 million with an FDV of $1.7 billion. The token price has since retreated and is fluctuating around $1.6.
In 2026, Hyperliquid gained significant market attention through its buyback flywheel and expansion into multiple sectors, with its token price surging from $20 to a peak of $76, setting a new all-time high. After adjusting at the beginning of the year, the price of Lighter's token has rebounded significantly recently. So, what factors are currently driving this?
Lighter is a decentralized perpetual contracts exchange. In December 2025, its native token LIT officially underwent Token Generation Event (TGE), accompanied by a large-scale airdrop. The total fixed supply is 1 billion tokens. Specifically, within the ecosystem portion, 25% was automatically airdropped to early users via points seasons at TGE, with the remaining 25% reserved for future incentives, partners, and growth. The team holds 26%, and investors hold 24%. The airdrop portion was released 100% at TGE.
The team and investor portions have a 1-year cliff (starting unlocking on December 30, 2026), followed by a 3-year linear unlock.
To date, the circulating supply remains at approximately 250 million tokens (25% of total supply), with the remaining 75% still locked. This means there is temporarily no VC and team unlock selling pressure in the second half of this year.
Buyback, LLP & Staking Pool
The buyback mechanism is the core of Lighter's value capture. The protocol uses all fee income generated from products like perpetual trading to buy back LIT tokens on the open market. Official disclosures show this buyback is fully programmatic: the protocol automatically aggregates all fee income hourly and places 100 limit buy orders from the current market price down to a -10% range.
According to the latest data from Lighter, since TGE, the protocol has programmatically bought back approximately 15 million LIT, accounting for about 6% of the circulating supply, with a buyback amount of around $21 million, representing 1.51% of the total supply. These buybacks directly convert protocol revenue into continuous on-chain buy-side pressure.
So, how is Lighter currently performing in the market?
Data from the official website shows its total trading volume has exceeded $1.68 trillion. However, its trading volume has been declining this year due to factors like sluggish market conditions.
In comparison, Hyperliquid's total trading volume has surpassed $4.37 trillion, nearly three times that of Lighter, and its volume has remained stable since September-October 2025.
However, turning our attention to open interest, Lighter's open interest data from November 2025 was $1.6 billion, while the current data is $750 million, which isn't drastically low. Hyperliquid's open interest peaked at $9.64 billion and currently remains at $5.06 billion.
Meanwhile, Lighter continues to iterate on the product side. In May, it partnered with Insilico Terminal to introduce a professional-grade execution management system, attracting systematic traders and deepening order book liquidity. The platform has launched a Pre-IPO perpetual contracts market and introduced features like LIT fee points, expanding trading scenarios and user engagement. These actions complement the buyback flywheel, amplifying protocol revenue and buy-side effects under macro event drivers.
Simply put, the Lighter Liquidity Pool (LLP) is the market maker capital pool for the Lighter exchange. In a centralized exchange, when a user goes long, the counterparty is typically a market maker (institution) or another user going short. However, in a decentralized exchange, the underlying logic changes: the "common counterparty" for all traders' positions across the entire exchange is the LLP. In other words, if users profit from going long, the LLP pays them; if users incur losses, those losses are directly absorbed into the LLP.
According to historical big data statistics, retail traders are highly likely to lose money over long periods. Therefore, large players depositing their USDC into the LLP to act as the casino's bankroll are essentially "acting as the house," passively profiting from retail traders' losses and the exchange's fees.
According to the latest official website data, its TVL has risen to $98.42 million, with an annualized rate reaching 11.47%. According to Lighter's official rules, entering the LLP requires staking LIT tokens equivalent to 1/10th of the deposited capital amount. This design makes many large players one of the biggest spot buyers of LIT in the secondary market. The more USDC they deposit, the more LIT tokens are locked in the market.
It's important to note that the LLP liquidity pool is not shared with the staking pool; they are separate pools.
According to the latest official website data, its annualized yield is 4.06%, with 123.23 million LIT tokens staked, totaling over $204.6 million in value.
Compared to Hyperliquid, Concerns Remain
In the perpetual contracts DEX sector, Hyperliquid, with its first-mover advantage and scale effect, is the current recognized leader, while Lighter has established a unique position through technical differentiation and product focus.
Hyperliquid also implements an aggressive revenue buyback strategy with considerable scale. However, combined with staking gas fees and ecosystem incentives, it forms a more comprehensive token utility system. Lighter's buyback execution has certain advantages in transparency and predictability, while Hyperliquid's buyback is matched with a higher base of protocol revenue.
Furthermore, Hyperliquid has broader coverage: beyond perpetual contracts, it continues to expand into RWA and a more complete DeFi ecosystem, even prediction markets (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum price predictions). As of June 16th, the World Cup-related section within the HIP-4 prediction markets on Hyperliquid saw its 7-day trading volume surge 202% week-over-week. Continuous business expansion broadens its audience and trading volume, which in turn further boosts the buy-side pressure for the HYPE token. In contrast, Lighter is still focusing on RWA and Pre-IPO layouts and hasn't ventured into areas like prediction markets.
Institutions are also increasingly buying HYPE. According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi's monitoring, since June 1st, wallets related to a16z have withdrawn 1,229,524 HYPE ($85.54 million) and deposited them for staking. Even the prominent endorser Arthur Hayes tweeted, "Looking at the current crypto market cap rankings, most are shitcoins. I believe HYPE should at least surpass SOL before this bull cycle ends."
US institutions have also launched a HYPE spot ETF, providing stable support for its price. According to SoSoValue data, the cumulative net inflow for US HYPE spot ETFs is currently $182.56 million. In contrast, LIT still relies solely on secondary market activity and buybacks for price support.
Currently, LIT lacks both influential figure endorsements and public, continuous buying by large institutions, leaving a hint of concern for its token price.
Overall, Hyperliquid currently dominates in scale, liquidity, and ecosystem breadth, while Lighter is building its competitive advantages through its ZK tech stack, transparent buyback mechanism, zero fees for retail users, and differentiated tools for institutional players.
The future relative performance of both will depend on their execution in trading volume growth, product iteration, and market adoption.
