Lotus

Fortune favours the bold. perp dex summer. digital assets and making money. Substack below for more reads

[Lotus @lotusroid]

🕯️I am here to assure you hundreds per point is not a pipe dream 🕯️

Thought I would do a bit of refining of my model since Lighter growth and traction has been insane the past week.
Fun piece of info from @choffstein 's podcast recently with @vnovakovski

Lighter founder and CEO Vlad shared:
"I think [LLP] right now represents the lion's share of the liquidity still, like, something in the neighborhood of 80%."

"So I could see a scenario where by the end of the year, LLP comes down to, you know, 50% of liquidity or less."

The implication of this: Assuming that MMs operate with a liquidity turnover ratio of 0.6, i.e., their trade volume is 60% of their deployed liquidity (60%*20% = 12%). I stay conservative here, aiming to reflect moderate trading activity relative to liquidity (more aggressive = ratio of >0.75). This is in line with my previous estimation of 15%.
I assume this ratio for LLP to be 0.4, reflecting its primary role as backstop liquidity.

I applied an exponential growth model to historical data from mid-end June to 26 September to project TVL and volume growth. This forecasts TVL to cross $1b at end Nov when Lighter TGE is expected to be, also in line with @satoshiheist 's accelerated growth model.

Long story short - we could see $1.7b TVL in January, along with $30m monthly revenues / $360m annualised. All this, not accounting yet for spot trading and future plans to tap on the entire Ethereum eco.

At 10x multiple Lighter would be valued at $360m * 10 = $3.6b
At 10m points and 30% airdrop, that's $108 per point

recent cases tell me this is too probably conservative

You can call me a bullish retard
but I tell you you're not bullish enough

🕯️

[Lotus @lotusroid]

gLighter

Why Lighter Could Be Worth $25b

https://t.co/g00EbQph0k

[eric @econoar]

$HYPE + ethereum:0x232ce3bd40fcd6f80f3d55a522d03f25df784ee2 and chill thesis:

1. HYPE hate rally
2. LIT vs HYPE CT debate
3. Perp pie 10x
4. LIT hate rally
5. LIT vs HYPE CT debate
6. Perp pie 10x

Rinse and repeat until $1000/$50

[Supertramp @StayRoamer]

Intern notes from @lighter_xyz's Q2 Investor Call

> 100% of revenue keeps going to buybacks. 6M LIT were bought back in Q2, while half the circulating supply is currently staked. Staking yield has a 6% target

> Token burns will be performed. Value from Lighter products and services will keep accruing to tokenholders rather than having a hybrid equity/token model

> Lighter is operating the world's largest proving infra: 3053 Apple Silicon Mac Minis optimized for high-throughput ZK proving. The system processes hundreds of millions of orders per day, then uses ZK proofs to verify batches of trades, cancellations and liquidations approx every 30 minutes.

> Infra optimizations helped cut costs by more than 50%. P99 latency over WebSockets was also reduced from a variable 200ms+ to 55ms. A detailed technical post will be shared soon.

> During Q2, a fireside chat was held with Vitalik, and @l2beat independently verify Ligter's escape hatch

> More than 25 new RWA markets have been added during Q2, including STRC, SpaceX, and pre-IPO futures like Anthropic and OpenAI. OI grew steadily (currently 21.5%), with volumes sustaining around 12% of the platform's total

> The Beta RFQ program processed more than $1B in volume, materially improving execution for RWAs and long-tail assets

> Advanced TWAP, atomic orders, and chase-limit orders are now live on mainnet, with more advanced order types being developed

> USDC and ETH are live as collateral, with ~ $4.2M ETH currently on the platform. Q3 Roadmap includes more stablecoins, tokenized gold, LLP, BTC, stocks, alongside a risk-margin model for correlated positions

> Long term, Lighter wants users to post tokenized equities as collateral and reuse that margin across perpetuals, options, and yield opportunities

> Lighter is now available through the @RobinhoodApp Wallet. The instance features volume-linked fees, and a 50/50 revenue share with higher maker fees. 11M LIT incentives will be distributed on the instance

> Lighter is expanding distribution across crypto-native and mainstream consumer businesses. Integrators have generated $6.4B in total volume, including $2.7B in retail volume through the @wallet_tg integration

> Lighter does not plan to compete as a general-purpose blockspace network. Instead, Lighter EVM is intended to provide revenue-generating trading infrastructure: an admin layer, with atomic execution and a programmable interface to Lighter’s matching engine

> Roadmap includes Lighter Domains, independent execution environments connected through Lighter EVM, and shared canonical bridge infrastructure

> Options are a central part of the roadmap. They will cover both RWA and crypto markets and enable on-chain structured products and yield strategies. Lighter also expects its derivatives-license work to cover options

> The ecosystem keeps growing, with 60+ apps built on top of Lighter, as reported by Lit Hub

> Team is working closely with the CFTC on a path to becoming a regulated US exchange capable of serving US customers. Regulatory progress could unlock institutional adoption and additional distribution opportunities, with ZK-based counterparty permissioning as a way to support KYC and institutional compliance without publicly exposing user data

[Lighter @Lighter_xyz]

Robinhood Wallet users can now trade perps and Stocks Tokens directly through Lighter on Robinhood Chain!

[Lighter @Lighter_xyz]

https://t.co/kXWh2glZuj

[Dovey "Rug the fiat" Wan (hiring) @DoveyWan]

Had a 4hr+ dinner with a SpaceX tech lead fren who joined in 2015. Gotta write down the hot take because it is very different from the usual “ @elonmusk is a tech visionary” story

The less glorified employee perspective is actually more interesting: many core engineers did not stay locked in for 10+ yrs purely because of “the vision.” As frontline operators, they often did not even know what concrete vision to believe in.

Going to Mars 10 yrs ago sounded too delusional to be a real operating plan. My fren joked that it was more like “believing in the power of believing” lol

What they did believe in was Elon’s ability to keep winning the next war chest: capital, debt, federal contracts, customer deposits, attention, narrative, most importantly market patience. That matters a lot more than outsiders realize, and ofc thanks to the big mom who keep all the shits together @Gwynne_Shotwell

In frontier engineering, morale does not only come from mission. It comes from believing the company will survive long enough for impossible work to compound.
Elon’s real genius may be that he turns capital formation into an engineering input.

Put together marginally enough resources > buy engineering time > ship impossible progress > earn more credibility > unlock more resources > make the next impossible bet fundable

This is why his companies keep forming silo network effects then Elon threaded them into a massive macro network effect

- x com first
- Tesla on earth physical traffic + charging grid + solar grid
- Tesla FSD data network & edge compute network, which was a very underrated E2E track for AV (and most wouldnt bet on that track, ie Waymo spent massive money relying on lidar and HD map)
- Starlink for connectivity first and now compute
- Twitter/X for on earth digital traffic
- xAi and Colossus compute network ...

He also mentioned how X Money fills in the puzzle, which is not random, as the macro network now is looking for its own banking layer, all of which are high-stakes financial gambits that constantly need capital, debt capacity, payment rails, and balance-sheet engineering load.

He has apparently hinted more than once that maybe spacex should just build a bank. The X Money card is still beta, but the perks are already wild: 6% APY and 3% cashback. Employees are extremely doped about it, not just for the perks, but because it makes them feel like first-class citizens of “Elon Nation.” and this might ignite another network effect that will connect them all and eventually evolve into a full bank.

Tesla built the energy/data network.
Starlink built the connectivity/orbital compute network.
X built the attention/distribution network.
xAI built the reasoning and inference network.
X Money tries to close the financial network.

Ya ofc Elon is one of the biggest "technology visionary" in our life time, but I increasingly think the he's the best network effect engineer on earth, which will get us to brute force out of earth itself. And the biggest network of all like @balajis has shared, is the network state.

Welcome to Elon Nation

[Supertramp @StayRoamer]

Shaping up nicely

[hansolar @hansolar21]

The elon musk premium is just wild

[Sebastian Bürgel @SCBuergel]

Honestly @Rabby_io, this is disgusting

Before I even set up my wallet, you are sending my data to
- your matomo instance
- and just in case track me on Google Analytics
- and to be really sure dump my data into Sentry

I hereby kindly inform you that this is a breach of your Privacy Policy (yes, the one that you last looked at 5 years ago) and a gross violation of GDPR Articles 13 and 46.

Please stop tracking me at your earliest convenience. Thank you.

[jez (equity perps era) @izebel_eth]

jokes aside, going to sign off on this note before going to bed:

im one of the bigger crypto believers i know, and these past six months have tested me like no other bear has, mainly for the fact that i don't see any easy way out/reason it'd turn around quickly

people are leaving who wont come back right away, capital continues to choose better opportunities with more certainty, dat overhangs will cast a long shadow

and thats coming from a position of strength, spot/cash - those who believed on leverage or picked the wrong coins are going through worse trials

its going to get worse before it gets better

but it will get better, it always does, theres a finite supply of btc in an infinite money printing world, and some day in the next year after leaving and not paying attn those people will realize btc is 80k again, and if it can survive saylor it can survive anything

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Lighter is still building in the background.

The protocol has shifted from chasing volume directly to letting other companies route their users through its order book.

Market makers want to trade against retail flow, so when partners route it onto Lighter they follow it in and bring real depth with them. The bigger systematic traders need that depth to size into the book.

Telegram Wallet has brought roughly 45K new users onto Lighter since mid-April. Insilico did over $175M in volume on its first day routing through Lighter.

Lighter takes no base builder fee, so users only pay Insilico's own 1bp instead of the 5.5bps the same trade would cost through Hyperliquid's builder codes.

Time will tell if this pays off for Lighter.

[Lotus @lotusroid]

@hibachi_xyz Hibachio

[flip @trevor_flipper]

https://t.co/HljB1j9IhV

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jensen Huang just described something that should keep every worker in America awake tonight.

Not because AI is coming for their job.

Because most of them never understood what their job actually was.

Huang: “The task of our job and the purpose of our job are related, not the same.”

Most people think their job is the thing they do with their hands for eight hours a day.

Write code. Fill spreadsheets. Draft emails. Push pixels.

That was never the job.

That was the task.

The job was always the thinking underneath it.

Huang: “If you apply that to me, you would come to the conclusion what Jensen does for a living is tap on phones and talk. And tapping on phones and talking, AI has done that just fine. And therefore my job should be gone. But I’m busier than ever.”

This is the part nobody wants to sit with.

The people panicking about AI aren’t afraid of losing their work.

They’re afraid of finding out they never had any.

They had a routine. A repetitive motion. A series of keystrokes that felt like purpose.

Now a machine does it in four seconds.

Huang: “AI has created more than half a million jobs in the last couple of years.”

The data says one thing.

The fear says another.

Because the fear was never about employment numbers.

It was about identity.

We spent fifty years hunched over keyboards, convinced the hunching was the work.

Huang: “The idea that being human means to hunch over on this little thing, typing all the time… 50 years before that, people didn’t do that.”

Fifty years.

That’s all it took to build an entire identity around a posture.

We don’t type for a living. We think for a living. We imagine for a living.

The keyboard was always just the delivery mechanism. Never the product.

Huang: “It is a fundamental flaw that we only need a billion lines of code written. We need a trillion lines of code written.”

The demand was always infinite.

The bottleneck was always our fingers.

AI doesn’t shrink the workforce. It removes the cap on what the workforce can actually build.

Huang: “Companies that use AI have demonstrated the ability to grow faster. When they grow faster, they hire more people.”

Growth doesn’t eliminate people. It pulls them in.

Every industrial revolution triggered the same panic. Same headlines. Same wrong conclusion.

And every single time, the economy didn’t contract.

It expanded into territory that didn’t exist before.

The real question was never whether AI takes your job.

It was whether you were ever anything more than the motions you repeated.

Because somewhere in the last fifty years, we stopped asking what the work was for.

We just kept typing.

And now the typing is done.

And millions of people are about to meet themselves for the first time.

With nothing to hide behind.

Some of them won’t survive what they find.

[Lotus @lotusroid]

@StayRoamer @Lighter_xyz Is this accurately reflected on the tools > stats page on lighter?

[flip @trevor_flipper]

pretty solid day one for insilico x lighter partnership

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war.

The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started.

Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous.

If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Bluntz @Bluntz_Capital]

amazing article on $cards

[Lotus @lotusroid]

If their profit margin of 4% reported in Sep 2025 still holds, that means they made $3m+ this month, more than @Lighter_xyz in both revenue (~$2.3m) and profits

Not a dig at $LIT ofc but curious to see the $CARDS value accrual play out

[Kyle @zeroxkyle]

Congratulations @Collector_Crypt for the incredible month of April

[Zoomer Oracle @ZoomerOracle]

1/ Despite the price action of $LIT being in a downtrend, the product and statistics show something different considering the bear market conditions.

The conclusion is simple:
- Hyperliquid remains the king of perp DEXs, with Lighter in 2nd. On an organic basis.
- CEXs have a lot more competition coming, with perp DEXs putting more emphasis on tokenization of RWAs.

Below, an analysis by @epochbiz.

Special thanks to @vxdenton for the visuals and analysis, our newest addition to the @epochbiz team.