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Lighter Secures $68M Funding at $1.5B Valuation, Eyes Spot Market Launch

3 hours ago
Bitcoin Ethereum News

Lighter has announced a $68 million funding round, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The move underscores growing investor confidence in the exchange’s rapid growth and its potential to redefine onchain trading.

The numbers back it up. Lighter has processed over $71 billion in perpetual trading volume, ranking as the 1 DEX by weekly volume and among the top 3 by open interest. Markets are already pricing in a 92% chance of a token launch and airdrop this year, a sign of just how much attention Lighter is attracting.

And the story’s only beginning.

Spot Markets Set to Launch

Lighter is now preparing to roll out Spot Markets in the coming days, a major expansion beyond perpetuals.

This launch could mark the start of a new DEX era. The exchange’s architecture is built to handle 10,000+ TPS with a 5ms latency, putting it closer to the speed and feel of traditional finance exchanges like NASDAQ, but fully onchain.

More importantly, Lighter Spot directly addresses the three biggest problems that have long haunted DEXs on Ethereum:

  •  High latency
  •  MEV and private mempools
  •  Poor scalability

With this approach, Lighter aims to deliver an experience that feels like a centralized exchange, without sacrificing DeFi’s open nature.

Can Uniswap Lose Its Crown?

It’s the question on everyone’s mind: can Uniswap, the long-standing DEX giant, lose its position?

The short answer: Yes.

To understand why, you have to look back at how DEXs evolved. The first wave of decentralized exchanges like EtherDelta and ForkDelta used a central limit order book (CLOB) model directly on Ethereum.

It worked, barely.

Ethereum’s technical limitations, paired with low liquidity, crippled these early designs. There were no efficient onchain market makers, spreads were wide, and order books were shallow. The result: clunky trading that felt like proof-of-concept more than real market infrastructure.

These early DEXs proved decentralized trading could work, just not well enough.

How AMMs Took Over

To fix that, the industry shifted toward simplicity.

Enter Automated Market Makers (AMMs), the model that powered Uniswap and changed DeFi forever. Instead of relying on buyers and sellers to meet directly, AMMs used liquidity pools, allowing anyone to swap tokens instantly.

The advantages were clear:

1. Far better liquidity

2. No need for counterparties to confirm trades

This model unlocked instant trades and constant liquidity, letting users execute swaps at any time. It was revolutionary, and it defined the DeFi boom between 2020 and 2023.

But AMMs had their own issues.

The AMM Problem

As DeFi matured, AMMs started showing cracks.

The model led to impermanent loss, slippage, and MEV extraction. Liquidity providers were often at a disadvantage, and professional traders found the environment inefficient.

Dozens of teams tried to patch the system. We saw innovations like private mempools, intents and resolvers, and concentrated liquidity. Each one helped, a little. But none solved the core problem.

Real, high-frequency trading, the kind that drives true market depth, just wasn’t possible.

Market makers and HFTs focused more on extracting MEV than providing actual liquidity. Ethereum’s design became a series of “workarounds” rather than a sustainable trading framework.

The truth became clear: AMMs are great for swaps, not trading.

Lighter’s Architecture: Built for Traders

Lighter took a different path.

Its architecture delivers scalability, speed, and security, offering the first real alternative to AMM-based DEXs. With 5ms latency, tens of thousands of TPS, and full Ethereum alignment, it offers the performance of a centralized exchange, without compromising on decentralization.

It’s thousands of times faster than Uniswap on Ethereum, and hundreds of times faster than AMM systems on Layer-2s.

From a technical perspective, Lighter bridges the gap between TradFi efficiency and DeFi transparency.

From a business perspective, it’s even more aggressive.

0% Fees and CEX-Like Experience

Lighter’s user model is bold: 0% trading fees for users, compared to 0.3% on volatile pairs for Uniswap.

This pricing structure doesn’t just attract traders, it threatens to reshape user expectations across DeFi.

Its trading experience mirrors CEX platforms, making it easier for centralized exchange users to migrate onchain. Combined with its established Futures platform, Lighter already has a high-revenue engine in place for sustainable growth.

Simply put, it’s designed to compete with both Uniswap and Binance, not just in ideology, but in performance and profit.

The Bigger Picture: From AMM to Real Trading

Uniswap’s AMM was perfect for DeFi’s early years. It brought in millions of users, simplified liquidity provision, and made decentralized trading accessible.

But it wasn’t built for the next phase, the mass migration from centralized to onchain trading.

That’s where Lighter comes in.

With funding secured, a $1.5B valuation, and institutional interest rising, Lighter is positioning itself as the next-generation DEX, one capable of offering real trading, low latency, and deep liquidity, all while staying true to Ethereum’s decentralized ethos.

The launch of Spot Markets could accelerate that transition. If successful, Lighter may not just challenge Uniswap, it might redefine what it means to trade onchain.

Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services.

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Source: https://nulltx.com/lighter-secures-68m-funding-at-1-5b-valuation-eyes-spot-market-launch/