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Coin Launch at Year-End? What Makes Lighter Stronger than Hyperliquid
In recent days, several addresses suspected to be associated with Lighter team members have purchased $125,000 worth of "YES" shares in the polymarket's "Will Lighter TGE Before End of Year" market. Just a few days ago, Coinbase also announced that LIGHTER would be added to its listing roadmap. All signs point to Lighter's TGE finally being on the horizon.
The market will eventually punish every arrogant bystander, just as many initially viewed Hyperliquid as a performance-enhanced but more centralized GMX. Many people habitually saw Lighter as yet another imitator of Hyperliquid.
However, Lighter differs significantly from Hyperliquid in its business model, development strategy, and technical architecture. These differences suggest that Lighter will be the first real threat to Hyperliquid outside of CEX.
Retail-Friendly Fee Structure
Compared to Hyperliquid's tiered fee structure based on trading volume, Lighter has adopted a 0 fee approach to attract retail traders.
According to community user @ilyessghz2's calculations, for ordinary traders with principal between $1,000 and $100,000, Lighter's total execution cost (slippage + fees) is significantly lower than Hyperliquid's.
Hyperliquid's low fee advantage is mainly seen in large capital accounts of over $500,000, while in the broader long tail retail range, Lighter actually offers a more competitive trading cost. This "feeless" feature's perception is particularly evident for retail traders engaged in high-frequency trading.
Underrated Business Model
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Behind the 0 fee structure, Lighter essentially transplants Robinhood's business model—Payment For Order Flow (PFOF)—onto the blockchain.
Lighter sells retail order flow to market makers, who profit from the bid-ask spread and pay kickbacks to Lighter. PFOF ingeniously transforms explicit trading costs into implicit execution costs (such as slightly wider spreads).
The fundamental reason behind the establishment of the PFOF model is that market makers are willing to pay for retail order flow because these orders are often seen as "ignorant liquidity." Compared to institutional orders, retail trade directions often lack accurate predictions of future price movements and are more based on emotion or short-term fluctuations, so market makers face very low risks of adverse selection and have significant profit potential.
As trading volume expands, Lighter is able to demand higher rebates from market makers. This model has long been validated in traditional finance, with Robinhood earning hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter solely through PFOF.
L1 Is a "Bug"
The statement by Lighter's founder that "L1 is a Bug, not a feature" once placed himself at the center of controversy, but this statement indeed alluded to the pain point of Hyperliquid.
In the "JellyJelly Attacks HLP" event, the team protected HLP's funds through a "cut-off" method. The "formalism" of validators' voting cannot conceal the platform's centralization issue itself.
In addition, Hyperliquid's spot trading relies on HyperUnit, a multisig cross-chain bridge controlled by a few nodes. The dark history of multisig cross-chain bridges like Ronin and Multichain has repeatedly shown that no matter how sophisticated the multisig design is, as long as it involves human trust, there is a risk of being 51% attacked by hackers through social engineering.
As a monolithic application chain, institutions must bear additional trust costs for the bridging nodes and the chain's security, which is almost an insurmountable barrier in terms of compliance.
Choosing to become an Ethereum L2 allows Lighter to eliminate the need for a third-party trust assumption. For risk-averse institutional funds, this is a fundamental difference. After entering Stage 1 of L2 in the future, even if Lighter's sequencer behaves maliciously or crashes, users can still force withdrawals through ETH mainnet contracts.
And this is just the beginning. The crown jewel of Lighter's technical architecture is a "universal full-asset guarantee" system achieved through zero-knowledge proofs that can be mapped back to the Ethereum mainnet.
DeFi liquidity is fragmented. Deposits on Aave, LP tokens on Uniswap, staked stETH on Lido—users' assets across platforms cannot directly serve as trading margins.
Using ZK technology, Lighter allows users to lock assets from the Ethereum mainnet (such as stETH, LP Tokens, or even future tokenized stocks) in an L1 contract, while directly mapping them to collateral on L2, without relying on a separate L1 <-> L2 cross-chain bridge. This means users can hold stETH on the mainnet to earn staking rewards while using it as collateral to open contracts on Lighter, enabling real-time settlement on the mainnet, achieving "yield stacking," and maximizing capital efficiency.
This mapping capability has brought security to Lighter that other L1 Perp DEXs cannot match, making it a key asset in attracting institutional funds.
「Iron Triangle」
An "iron triangle" consisting of "Robinhood-Lighter-Citadel" is emerging.
Lighter's founder, Vladimir Novakovski, previously worked at Citadel, the world's largest market maker, and served as an advisor to Robinhood. Robinhood is the most widely used retail stock brokerage, Citadel is Robinhood's largest market-making partner, and Robinhood is a direct investor in Lighter.
In an ideal scenario, this could become a perfect business loop. Robinhood is responsible for frontend user acquisition, bringing tens of millions of retail stock traders into the crypto world; Lighter serves as the backend execution engine, handling matching and clearing, providing a Nasdaq-level trading experience and the security benefits of ZK-rollup; while market makers like Citadel are responsible for handling this order flow.
Once Citadel decides to make Lighter its primary venue for hedging and trading tokenized stocks, stock perpetual contracts, and RWAs, all brokers relying on Citadel's liquidity will have no choice but to connect to Lighter. In this narrative, Lighter becomes the interface connecting traditional finance with the on-chain world.
Convergence
Through the HIP-3 proposal, Hyperliquid outsourced market deployment to an external team, leading to ecosystem prosperity and strong buying pressure on HYPE, but inevitably resulting in significant liquidity fragmentation—such as two HIP-3 exchanges, Felix and Trade.xyz, both supporting TSLA trading, causing liquidity dispersion for the same asset.
At the same time, exchanges under the HIP-3 model have blurred and difficult-to-unify compliance responsibilities, unable to centrally address compliance issues.
Backed by top-tier capital from investors such as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, a16z, and Coinbase Ventures, Lighter has strategically positioned itself in the regulatory game.
Lighter's insistence on a monolithic unified architecture also echoes Citadel's call to the SEC: "Tokenized assets must have the same rules, the same protection, and the same market structure."
Privacy
Hyperliquid's transparent transaction feature is a clear disadvantage for large fund users. On-chain data exposes the entry price and liquidation point of all large positions, making whales vulnerable to front-running and targeted liquidation risks.
Lighter can conceal users' transaction and position data. For large funds and institutional investors, anonymity is a fundamental requirement when conducting large transactions. After all, no one wants to reveal their hand to a counterparty.
As the on-chain derivatives market matures, platforms that can effectively protect user transaction privacy will have a better opportunity to attract core liquidity.
The TGE Curse of Perp DEX
The Token Generation Event (TGE) is often a watershed moment for the fate of Perp DEX. Hyperliquid's key to success lies in its ability to maintain or increase trading volume post-incentive, breaking the "mine and dump" curse.
Lighter, with a clearly defined VC unlock schedule, faces an even more severe test. After the airdrop expectations are met, will users flock to the next Perp DEX? Liquidity loss post-TGE leads to worsened slippage, directly impacting the trading experience and triggering a continuous decline in trading volume known as the "death spiral."
Conclusion
Shifting the focus away from local stock games, a more grand narrative is unfolding.
A year ago, few could foresee Hyperliquid truly challenging centralized exchanges. Lighter and Hyperliquid are not bitter rivals but comrades in the same trench. They both point toward that long-standing old order.
The war of Perp DEX against CEX has only just begun.
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After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
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1 billion DOTs were minted out of thin air, but the hacker only made 230,000 dollars
After the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, when will the war end?
Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions
The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.
There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."
No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.
In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.
X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.
This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.
The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.
The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.
After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."
From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.
In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.
As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."
Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.
For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.
This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.
There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."
X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.
In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.
WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.
X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.
These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.
This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.
X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.
Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.
The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.
X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.
The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.
App