Lighter reported a sharp expansion in derivatives activity during the third quarter, with total trading volume reaching $137.67 billion and open interest climbing above $1.64 billion by Sept. 30—roughly twice the prior quarter’s level, according to a company webcast. The figures place the decentralized exchange’s next phase of growth alongside an increasingly formal regulatory strategy in the United States, where it plans to submit applications to operate both a designated contract market and a derivatives clearing organization in November 2026.
LIT, the platform’s token, traded near $3.65 after briefly approaching $4, up 7.23% over 24 hours according to the figures supplied with the update. The price move followed disclosures covering revenue, token repurchases, planned options products, technical upgrades, and the company’s relationship with Robinhood Wallet.
Lighter chief executive officer Vladimir Novakovski said the platform generated $8.55 million in total revenue during the quarter. Its effective take rate—the amount earned relative to trading activity—rose to approximately 0.62 basis points from about 0.5 basis points in the previous quarter.
That gain came as Lighter began charging a 1 basis point fee for advanced order types while retaining free standard trading. The company also introduced Plus and Premium memberships aimed at lower-latency traders. Premium taker volume, referring to trades that immediately match against existing orders, accounted for more than 18.2% of activity at the end of Q3, up from 13.1% at the end of Q2.
Robinhood deployment adds concentrated RWA exposure
Lighter said the Robinhood-branded deployment ended the quarter with $454.1 million in open interest and nearly 40,000 accounts. About 70% of the open positions on that instance were in markets linked to real-world assets, or RWAs.
Under a 50/50 revenue-sharing arrangement, Lighter’s portion of trading fees from the Robinhood deployment exceeded $1.1 million in Q3, Novakovski said. The result gives the company a measurable commercial contribution from its U.S.-focused distribution relationship rather than simply an account-growth metric.
Robinhood Wallet is currently the exclusive partner for perpetual contracts on Lighter’s platform in the United States, according to the company. Perpetual contracts are derivatives that track an underlying asset without a fixed expiry date.
The core Lighter product passed 1 million accounts during the quarter. Account totals do not necessarily indicate monthly active traders or unique people, but the combination of account growth, rising open interest and higher fee capture points to a platform generating more revenue per unit of activity than it did in the preceding quarter.
Options and unified margin system planned
Lighter has begun rolling out binary options and intends to introduce conventional European-style call and put options before the end of the year. European-style options can be exercised only at expiration, unlike American-style contracts that may be exercised earlier.
The planned vanilla-options launch is paired with a unified risk engine that would calculate margin across spot markets, perpetuals and options. The model will use a portfolio-margin framework based on “worst realistic loss,” according to the company.
Such a system could reduce the amount of collateral required for traders holding offsetting positions across products, while also making risk calculations more complex than the isolated-margin systems common on many crypto derivatives venues. Bringing options, perpetuals and spot positions under one engine would place Lighter closer to the structure used by multi-asset derivatives platforms, where a portfolio’s combined exposure matters more than each position considered separately.
CFTC applications targeted for November 2026
Novakovski said Lighter remains in discussions with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and is preparing applications for both designated contract market, or DCM, and derivatives clearing organization, or DCO, registrations.
The company expects formal submissions in November 2026. Under the process described during the webcast, the statutory review period can run for as long as 180 days after submission.
A DCM registration would cover operation of a regulated trading venue, including order-book management. A DCO registration would address clearing functions, including liquidations and auto-deleveraging, known as ADL. Lighter said it has mapped its systems against 23 DCM core principles and 18 DCO core principles.
If approvals are granted, Novakovski said Lighter could seek integrations with futures commission merchants, or FCMs, which route customer orders to regulated derivatives exchanges. That route would require the company to meet operational and risk-management expectations substantially beyond those of a typical offshore crypto venue.
The regulatory timetable remains lengthy, and the applications have not yet been filed. Yet the company’s decision to pursue both venue and clearing registrations suggests it wants to control the full market structure for U.S. derivatives rather than rely solely on third-party clearing infrastructure.
Proofing upgrades target faster settlement
Lighter also reported improvements to the zero-knowledge technology that supports its exchange. Zero-knowledge proofs allow a system to verify that transactions were processed correctly without publishing all underlying data.
The company said year-to-date proving costs have fallen by more than 50%, while internal circuit and business-logic efficiency increased by three to four times. Average block proof time fell to about one minute from more than five minutes, an 81% reduction.
Those metrics matter for an exchange that settles activity through cryptographic proofs on Ethereum. Faster proof generation can shorten the gap between execution on the trading system and final settlement on-chain, while lower proving costs could make high-throughput trading less expensive to support.
During a security discussion, Lighter described several layers of protection: sequencer execution, zero-knowledge circuit proofs, Ethereum smart-contract verification and guardian oversight. It said it also uses artificial intelligence tools in testing and formal verification. A buffer between trade execution and Ethereum finalization gives operators time to investigate anomalies before settlement is finalized.
Token repurchases and staking tighten circulating supply
Lighter said it repurchased 2.45 million LIT during Q3 and burned the tokens on Ethereum. Cumulative repurchases reached more than 18.09 million LIT by the end of the quarter, equal to over 7% of the initial 250 million-token circulating supply, according to the company.
Staked balances totaled 109.8 million LIT, or 47.3% of the remaining circulating supply. The company said its unlock schedule contains no cliff events and releases tokens linearly over 36 months, with the first unlock set for Jan. 29, 2027.
Lighter plans to launch its LighterEVM mainnet before year-end. The proposed architecture would support synchronous reads from the core exchange system, asynchronous transfers and order management, on-chain vaults, request-for-quote tools, fiat onramps and standard Ethereum-compatible development tools, with zero-knowledge settlement to Ethereum.
Want deeper insight into Lighter’s U.S. expansion and derivatives push? Explore this detailed US crypto regulation outlook next.
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