Crypto derivatives startup Lighter closed a $68 million funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion ahead of its token generation event, backed by high-profile investors including Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Haun Ventures and Robinhood Markets, according to a Fortune report.
Founded by Vladimir Novakovski, Lighter is a zk-rollup perpetual futures exchange built on Ethereum, offering zero fees for retail users and advanced on-chain proofs for order matching and liquidations.
Data from DefiLlama shows that Lighter posted a 30-day perpetual trading volume of $279.5 billion, with a 24-hour volume of $10.7 billion and open interest of approximately $1.7 billion. The total value locked (TVL) also stands at $1.15 billion.
The funding round will support the expansion of the platform’s institutional offering, enhanced infrastructure for low-latency trading, and a full public launch. Lighter aims to challenge the increasingly competitive decentralized derivatives trading industry, which includes Hyperliquid and Aster.
Lighter says it will deploy derivatives on additional chains, deepen liquidity pools and introduce monetization models for institutional counterparties, while retail order flow will remain fee-free.
“Vlad and the team he built are 85 to 90 percent of the reason we made this investment,” Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, told Fortune.
Lighter did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for additional comment.
UPDATE (November 11, 4:13 p.m. UTC): Adds “:Report” to the title and that CoinDesk has contacted Lighter for additional comment.
