Vladimir Novakovski: Why Robinhood Chain And Lighter Both Bet On Ethereum (Composability Thesis)

Lighter is built on Ethereum and posts zero-knowledge proofs for every transaction, including orders, cancels, and liquidations, to ensure fair handling. The platform processes hundreds of millions of orders per day, translating to multiple billions in volume, and runs 3,000 Mac minis across the United States to generate those proofs. Prover costs represent approximately 10 percent of revenue, indicating strong margins on the infrastructure.

Robinhood Chain sits on top of Ethereum just as Lighter core does, making the two instances interoperable. A separate Lighter instance was created for Robinhood to accommodate different customer bases, regulatory requirements, and parameter settings, analogous to how CME and ICM differ in traditional finance. Novakovski said this decision would not have made sense had Robinhood Chain not achieved significant adoption beyond the perps product alone, and he described the Robinhood Chain launch as one of the best new-chain launches ever seen. The live demo trade at the London event was the first trade ever executed on the system, with the system not functioning until 30 minutes before the demo.

Fragmentation across Lighter instances is only as severe as the slowness in moving capital between them. The ZK proof infrastructure allows market makers to move capital between Lighter core and the Robinhood instance within minutes, with that window expected to shrink further. The regulatory barrier to interoperability applies only to market makers unwilling to complete KYC or KYB, and larger market makers are generally willing to comply. A firm like Citadel would likely participate only in the regulated instance, while firms with both onshore and offshore entities could participate in multiple instances. Novakovski said multiple instances only make sense when paired with partners that have very strong distribution, which limits the number of viable candidates. Telegram uses Lighter core rather than a separate instance. Lighter is also working with Axiom and the Ethereum Foundation on a project called One Lighter VM to make Ethereum L2s more interoperable.

Lighter's revenue reached approximately 70,000 dollars per day on a seven-day average in recent weeks, after peaking near 100,000 dollars per day several months ago. Revenue is described as diversified from the price of Bitcoin, and every AI IPO news event has become a catalyst for perps volume. Lighter was the first project to list Korean equity perps, starting in February. Novakovski predicted three massive trillion-dollar-plus IPOs are expected, one of which has been SpaceX, and said that after the remaining two, risk capital will return to crypto-native assets.

Lighter burned a significant portion of Lighter tokens valued at approximately 30 million dollars at the time and published the transaction hash publicly. Token buybacks have been happening programmatically for over six months and will continue on a quarterly programmatic basis. All value accrues to the token rather than to equity holders following the phase shift at TGE, and equity investors were informed after TGE that their equity would represent only token holdings on a vesting schedule. Only 1 percent of the cap table chose to exit when offered the option, and the last equity round was 5x oversubscribed. Lighter's equity in the Delaware C Corp is directly represented by the outstanding token supply with no dual structure. Novakovski cited a provision in the Clarity Act that could allow revenue sharing to token holders if revenue is generated programmatically on chain and distributions are governed by decentralized or DAO voting, and noted that a token meeting those criteria would not be classified as a security under that provision.

Go-to-market effort is currently split roughly half on core retail and half on partnerships. Lighter charges zero fees for retail and lower fees than competitors for non-retail users. Asset listings are driven by customer demand and liquidity from market makers. Lighter is planning to attend conferences in Asia in late September and early October and is experimenting with an RFQ program and additional features targeting whale traders. Programmatic trading strategy implementations such as TWAP strategies were an unexpectedly popular feature. AI agents accepting natural language market theses and executing trades are a near-term product direction being explored, and Novakovski noted that private TWAPs fit well with Lighter's ZK tech stack but rank around the top ten rather than the top two or three customer priorities. Novakovski also predicted that Cognition, co-founded by Scott Wu, is expected to release a benchmark ranking Chinese AI models against Anthropic and OpenAI on coding performance, which he described as potentially representing tradeable alpha on Lighter.