#ETF与衍生品 The Lighter TGE is really happening. Institutions are already pouring money to buy YES on Polymarket, and Coinbase has officially announced the token listing roadmap. This pace feels off 🚀

But the key point is—many people still see it as a simple alternative to Hyperliquid, which is a huge mistake. I’ve compared them carefully, and these two are not even in the same league:

**Business Model is Completely Different**
Hyperliquid charges tiered fees based on trading volume, so retail traders can’t get discounts. Lighter offers zero fees directly, only taking a slippage fee, which can save traders with 1,000 to 100,000 in principal more than half of their costs. Although there’s a 300ms delay, for retail traders, the slippage caused by this delay is still much cheaper than trading fees.

**Technical Architecture Dominates**
Lighter, as an ETH L2, uses ZK bridgeless cross-chain technology, allowing me to directly use mainnet stETH and LP tokens as collateral for opening contracts, while also earning staking rewards—this is insane. Hyperliquid is an independent L1, relying on multi-sig bridges, which increases trust costs.

**Privacy and Compliance**
On-chain transactions are fully transparent, making it easy for large traders to be targeted and liquidated. Lighter can hide position data, which is a hard requirement for institutional funds. Plus, with endorsements from Robinhood, Citadel, a16z, the compliance advantages are obvious.

Airdrops are very likely to come within the year, but the real test is whether liquidity can be retained after the TGE. Hyperliquid’s success is because trading volume continued to grow after the token distribution. Whether Lighter can break the “mine, dump, sell” curse is the key to winning this Perp DEX war.

This is not just another airdrop coin; it’s a signal that Perp DEX is aiming to overthrow CEX 🔥