#ETF与衍生品 Recently, discussions about Lighter and Hyperliquid have been heating up, and many friends have asked me what I think about these two platforms. To be honest, topics like these can easily lead people to be short-term hot-spot driven, so I want to analyze from a deeper perspective.

Lighter's zero-fee model is indeed attractive, but behind it is "exchanging money for time"—retail investors enjoy a 300-millisecond execution delay, while institutions pay for speed advantages. This design itself is not problematic; the key is the long-term sustainability of the trading experience. Hyperliquid, on the other hand, incentivizes large funds to trade continuously through tiered trading volume discounts. Both models have their own logic.

What’s more worth paying attention to are the differences in technical architecture. Lighter, as an Ethereum L2, allows user assets to be forcibly withdrawn via mainnet contracts, which provides an important security guarantee for institutions. Hyperliquid’s monolithic application chain design offers outstanding performance, but cross-chain risks remain a long-term hidden danger. I tend to believe that the architecture choice reflects different understandings of risk management.

Honestly, my biggest concern is liquidity after the TGE. Whether user stickiness can be maintained once incentives fade is the key to survival. Hyperliquid breaks the "mining, raising, selling" curse and achieves organic growth, while Lighter still has a long way to go. The airdrop at the end of the year is just the beginning; the real test is still ahead.

A prudent approach is to observe the real performance of both platforms after the incentive period and not be led by short-term hype. The competition in the derivatives market has just begun, and the landscape is far from settled.