Is Lighter Ethereum's L2 Perp DEX? | Founder Vlad Novakovski
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Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of perp dexes. We're here to help you become more bankless. You got Ryan and David on the podcast today. There's been a huge breakout this cycle. One of the themes has been decentralized perps exchanges led primarily by a application and a blockchain called Hyperliquid, but now some competition has entered the ring. And one in particular is moving up the charts in terms of open interest for perps and volume. It's caught our eye. It's called Lighter. It's now the second largest perps exchange. They're only two weeks in to Mainnet, so it's
I really enjoyed talking to Vlad and just getting his perspective as, like, why build a layer two perp decks? And I we didn't really specifically ask Vlad this question, but I don't think he's doing it because he believes in Ethereum or, like, wants to do the layer two model. He's doing it because between ZK and between a layer two, he can build what he thinks is the fastest, more performant perp decks. And so it's not a question of ideology.
It's a
question of just can he build the most technically performing chain. And so that I thought was pretty refreshing. Before we get into that conversation with Vlad, a moment to talk about some of our friends and sponsors over at Immunify. Security has been one of crypto's biggest issues. Hacks and exploits have cost the space not only billions of dollars, but billions of dollars worth of PR. So stop getting hacked. Don't get hacked in 2025. Immunify can help you with that. They are one of the most trusted brands in crypto security with a $180,000,000,000 in value protected and over $25,000,000,00
Thanks, David. Thanks, Ryan. Good to be here.
I wanna read out a tweet to get us started here because I enjoyed this tweet. Ryan enjoyed this tweet. This is a tweet from you. You said, being a layer one is a bug, not a feature. A layer one is just an Ethereum layer two without any of the security and verifiability parts. So, Vlad, why did you build Lighter as a ZK layer two?
Yeah. Well, I I think that one, obviously, it was a little bit tongue in cheek, but, you know, there there are some very good l ones as well, like, you know, like like Bitcoin is an obvious example. But but I guess my point was that, right, when we were making this architectural choice, like, you know, the hard part was inheriting the security layer of Ethereum while still having really good performance. And if, you know, it's like if you don't do that, then the way you can achieve security and verifiability is you know, it's it's a much harder problem to kind of rebuild all of the functionali
Can you get into that, Vlad? So we'll talk about performance maybe later, but the things that you get as an Ethereum layer too, the security piece, the verifiability piece. Mhmm. What what do you get by virtue of being an Ethereum layer two?
Right. Right. So the security piece is ensured through something called an escape hatch that we have. And, you know, if you look at our white paper, it explains that in kind of technical detail, but also if you go to l two beat, you know, that's we're one of the l twos that has that. But, basically, what the escape hatch means is that if the l two messes up or does stuff that is outside of the rules or if it gets hacked or, you know, kind of or let let's say our own team somehow gets corrupted or what whatever happens. If if that happens, then, you know, within a certain time frame, if it's no
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