Key Takeaways
- Lighter has raised $68 million in a new funding round, sources report.
- The deal values the company at $1.5 billion.
- Only a handful of DEXs have attained a similar level of success.
Decentralized perpetual futures exchange Lighter has raised $68 million in a new funding round, CEO Vladimir Novakovski announced in an interview on Tuesday, Nov. 11.
With a $1.5 billion valuation according to sources cited by Fortune, Lighter has joined the elite club of decentralized exchange (DEX) unicorns.
Not bad for a platform that requires an invite link to join.
Lighter Joins DEX Unicorn Club
While valuing DEXs is complicated, the private companies that build and maintain them have attracted significant investments.
At its last funding round in 2022, Uniswap Labs was valued at $1.66 billion, a price tag that reflects its significant UNI holdings and fee revenue from Uniswap’s front-end interface.
Meanwhile, although Hyperliquid Labs’ founders claim they self-funded the project, an associated U.S. entity, Hyperliquid Strategies, is seeking to raise $1 billion through a SPAC merger.
Lighter’s latest funding round is the first one Novakovski has publicly disclosed.
Although he remained tight-lipped about the details, he told Fortune the deal was for equity and warrants to a future token.
Standing With Giants
As decentralized perp activity has exploded in 2025, so has Lighter’s trading volume.
In the week leading up to Nov. 11, the platform outperformed Hyperliquid and Aster, stealing poll position in a competitive three-way race for dominance.
Having started the year roughly equal, today, perp DEXs routinely out-trade their spot peers with combined volumes typically around three times higher on the upstart derivatives platforms.
To consider another adoption metric, Hyperliquid’s total value locked (TVL) now rivals Uniswap’s and outstrips PancakeSwap by over 100%.
Even Lighter, which had a lower TVL of around $1.15 billion at the time of writing, has attracted more deposits than all but the largest spot DEXs.
Lighter’s Growth Model
Lighter’s adoption has exploded despite, or perhaps because of, its deliberately restrained growth strategy.
Rather than opening unrestricted access to anyone, new users must request an invite through Lighter’s official Discord channel or receive a referral code from an existing user.
The approach is fairly commonplace for projects like Lighter that are still in public beta.
What isn’t typical is the platform’s runaway success before it has even launched in full.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
