Lighter Enables Unified Collateral for Spot and Futures Trading

LIT, the native token of decentralized perpetuals exchange Lighter, rose as much as 13% over the past 24 hours as the platform rolled out new trading features, including unified collateral accounts.

The token traded as high as $1.62, but has since retraced to $1.59, up just over 11% on the day, according to CoinGecko. However, LIT is still down around 50% from its launch price of above $3.

The price action follows a series of product updates from Lighter this week. On Thursday evening, the DEX launched new trading account types that let users switch to a unified collateral system for spot and perpetual futures trading.

The company explained in a post on X that this is the first phase in a set of upgrades aimed at allowing “arbitrary tokens” to be used as collateral on the platform. Lighter also added that the next step is the tokenization of LLP, the platform’s market-making vault.

Lighter currently has $925.8 million in total value locked (TVL) and ranks fourth among perpetual DEXs by daily trading volume, according to DeFiLlama. The platform has also accumulated more than 801,000 users and processed over 59 billion transactions, according to its explorer.

Earlier this week, Lighter also announced new markets, including Korean equity perpetual futures. The platform now offers contracts linked to Hyundai, Samsung, SK Hynix, and the Korean Composite index, with up to 10x leverage, according to a post on X.

The upgrades come as perpetual futures trading continues to heat up across decentralized finance (DeFi), with exchanges racing to capture market share. Competitors like Hyperliquid and Aster remain the largest players, with $5.1 billion and $1.86 billion in open interest (OI), according to DeFiLlama. As of Friday, Lighter’s OI stands at $782 million.