Lighter achieved $1B in total value locked faster than any other perpetual dex

Some intern notes from @vnovakovski interview by @choffstein > Lighter doesn’t plan to rebuild all on-chain primitives itself, but rather be composable with Ethereum apps. Vlad says he’s “really optimistic” about the Ethereum ecosystem > Formal audits are being looked into, and should be done within a couple of months > Highlights that despite the Ethereum L2 sequencer being centralized, exploits wouldn’t be able to post fake proofs to the exchange. Also mentions Escape Hatch, through which users can withdraw collateral back to Ethereum safely > Decentralizing the sequencer is a roadmap item, just not prioritized at the moment > LLP’s liquidity model takes into account the size of the underlying spot markets (and of other perps) to avoid incidents > Plans to add isolated margin for newer markets (RWA futures, pre-launch perps) through a more risky version of LLP called “XLP”, to be isolated from the main pool - carrying higher risk, but higher returns > To date, about 50 API traders onboarded by the team, and another 100 that self-onboarded. > Currently, LLP represents 80% of the platform’s liquidity. Likely to go down as deposit caps are lifted - Vlad sees it going down to 50% by year-end. > Vlad underlines how there are no rebates for market makers, as they are able to turn a profit regardless of that. > LLP was initially seeded with $100K by the protocol, rest has been provided by users Recommend listening to the whole pod: lots of interesting talks about ZK tech on Lighter (8:05; 15:10), reasoning behind zero fees (46:45), and ideas around what composability might look like (54:07)

Ran some numbers on how expensive it is to market buy/sell $1M notional on BTC on new perp dexes It's clear at this point that fees are *not* paid in spread for @lighter_xyz, can long and short for ~ 0.5bps most of the time