Lighter’s Perpetual Futures Protocol Ignites Market with $68M Raise at $1.5B Valuation

DeFi's latest heavyweight flexes funding muscle—Wall Street's spreadsheet jockeys take note.

Lighter just pulled off a crypto coup, securing $68 million in fresh capital while sporting a unicorn-worthy $1.5 billion valuation. The perpetual futures protocol proves institutional money still chases decentralized derivatives—even when traditional markets sneeze.

Active traders are flocking to the platform's leveraged positions like moths to a blockchain flame. Meanwhile, VC funds keep writing checks faster than you can say 'risk-adjusted returns.'

One thing's clear: When it comes to perpetual contracts, the house always wins—unless the house runs on smart contracts.

Lighter, a decentralized trading platform for cryptocurrency derivatives, has closed a $68 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and fintech investor Ribbit Capital, according to a Fortune report on Tuesday.

Haun Ventures and online brokerage Robinhood also participated in the round, which marks a rare venture investment for the latter. The company separately disclosed a previously unreported $21 million raise in 2024 led by Haun Ventures and Craft Ventures, bringing total capital raised to $89 million.

Lighter operates both as a trading venue for perpetual futures contracts – derivatives allowing traders to speculate on cryptocurrency prices without contract expiration – and as a layer-2 blockchain built atop Ethereum. The platform plans to expand beyond derivatives into spot trading for digital assets including Bitcoin, according to founder and CEO Vladimir Novakovski.

The funding comes as Lighter rapidly scales in the competitive perpetuals trading market. Recent data from DeFiLlama shows the platform processing approximately $10.69 billion in 24-hour trading volume as of November 11, surpassing rival Aster to claim the top spot among decentralized perpetuals exchanges.

The 40-year-old Novakovski brings an unusual pedigree to crypto entrepreneurship. After immigrating from Russia as a child, he competed on U.S. national teams for international mathematics and physics competitions, enrolled at Harvard at 16, and graduated at 18 before joining hedge fund Citadel Investment Group as a trader.

His route to Lighter involved an unexpected detour through artificial intelligence. In 2017, Novakovski co-founded Lunchclub, an AI-powered networking platform that raised roughly $30 million and gained traction during pandemic lockdowns, Fortune reported. When user growth stalled in 2022, he transformed the company into Lighter while retaining most of the engineering team.

"What we want to do is to be the infrastructure LAYER that verifies that everything that happens in finance happens fairly, happens correctly, happens transparently," Novakovski said.

Joey Krug, a partner at Founders Fund, emphasized the team's capabilities as the primary investment rationale, telling Fortune that "Vlad and the team that he's built is like 85% to 90% of why we made the investment."

The platform launched in January 2025 after two years of development and has quickly accumulated over 403,000 users, $1.16 billion in total value locked, and $1.75 billion in open interest. Novakovski confirmed the business is operating profitably.

Lighter faces stiff competition in a market recently upended by Hyperliquid, an 11-employee operation that has challenged established centralized exchanges. Hyperliquid currently processes $8.71 billion in daily volume, while Aster, backed by major exchange Binance, saw its volume decline from $119.4 billion to $57 billion in recent trading.

The funding round combined equity and token warrants for a cryptocurrency Lighter has not yet launched.