Lighter’s LIT token has repeatedly reached new highs since Aug. 20, climbing to $3.8 on Aug. 26, nearly five times its March 30 low of about $0.78. The rally has been supported by a limited circulating supply of roughly 25%. Team and investor allocations remain locked until Dec. 30, 2026, leaving staking (locking crypto to earn rewards) as the main source of selling pressure. Lighter has also repurchased 17.3 million LIT, equivalent to 1.73% of total supply and 6.92% of circulating supply. Investors have additionally focused on Lighter’s trading-oriented infrastructure: a ZK Rollup (zero-knowledge scaling network for Ethereum) that places matching, liquidation and risk controls directly into circuit proofs before settling compressed state to Ethereum. The design seeks to pair high-frequency trading performance with Ethereum-backed security and on-chain data availability that protects users’ ability to exit. Official figures cited in the source show sub-5ms matching latency, capacity for 20,000 orders and cancellations per block, and a decline in average block verification time from about 5.3 minutes to about 1 minute over the past month. Lighter’s total value locked exceeds $1.1 billion, ranking it fifth among independently developed L2 networks in the cited comparison. The article argues that this architecture, together with Lighter’s partnership with Robinhood, has helped investors assign a premium to the project as a perpetual DEX (decentralized exchange for perpetual contracts) centered on verifiable execution and institutional-grade security.