The bear case on
$LIT was that Robinhood picked Bitstamp over Lighter for US perps
@Lighter_xyz responded by announcing it plans to file for its own CFTC derivatives license in November, aiming to be the first CFTC-approved on-chain perp DEX
@citrini gave it a 10% weight in their portfolio. I was late getting into position on
$LIT, but I still beat them to it.
Let's unpack the bear FUD first.
At
@RobinhoodApp's Sept 29th summit, it said US perps would run through Bitstamp, and LIT fell 14-20%
I, personally, lost several trillion imaginary dollars in the great nothing-burger panic that day.
Then came Lighter's Q3 gigachad investor call on Oct 21st. The team said it plans to submit the application in November. The CFTC should respond within 180 days.
When I had Lighter's Head of Growth, Trevor King
@trevor_flipper on
@MilkRoadDaily in September, he told me the team was "spending a lot of time with the CFTC trying to get US licensing."
Founder Vladimir Novakovski says the team has been talking with regulators for about 11 months. (Translation: they've hashed things out)
LIT jumped about 19% after the investor call, to $3.94
I, personally, made several trillion imaginary dollars that day of days.
The license matters because of how Lighter makes money. Retail trades for ZERO fees, and Lighter earns from premium tiers sold to market makers and API traders
King's pitch: "Zero fees makes us a really good dance partner because we can share economics really well." A US license lets Lighter pitch that to US brokers directly
Robinhood already took the deal outside the US. Lighter runs the perps in Robinhood's wallet on a 50/50 revenue split
Lighter buys
$LIT with that revenue and burns it: 15.64M on Jul 10 and 2.45M on Oct 11, over 7% of circulating supply
Across both instances, Lighter now carries about $1.6B of open interest and did about $2.9B of volume in the last 24 hours (from whenever I last checked before writing all this at two in the morning)
The product keeps shipping too, and this, to me, is the huge thing everyone is overlooking. Lighter isn't going after just perps. They are coming for every trading market they can reach.
- BTC and ETH binary options went live this week (prediction markets)
- Lighter Core passed 1M accounts
- King told me a full options suite is coming by the end of the year
- all your trade are belong to us
Alright, now a dose of reality. They still don't have the actual license yet, and King told me the CFTC gets a 180-day window to answer an application. So it could be a bit.
The team and investor cliff also ends Dec 27 per Tokenomist, and
@m0xt_ estimates about $50M of tokens a month could unlock from January against about $3M a month of buybacks
Lighter's Founder and CEO
@vnovakovski addressed these concerns in the Q3 gigachad investor call as well, but the concerns remain for the time being.
Supply of LIT and demand for all of its products are going to battle it out on the charts for a while, perhaps, but ultimately, this market is huge, and Lighter is extremely well positioned. They have an amazing team, bold strategy, and proven results.
I think it's pretty
$LIT
CoinGecko lists Lighter's Robinhood Chain instance alone at about $421M of open interest.
I am also openly interested.
Disclosure: I hold
$LIT in my Milk Road PRO portfolio. We were early to
$UNI (+54.8%),
$AERO (+93.7%), and
$SOL (+39.1%)
Try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days, link in bio:
@BitcoinJesusETH