Lighter price jumped nearly 20% after L2BEAT pushed back against claims that the perp DEX works like a centralized exchange.
Lighter, a perpetual futures decentralized crypto exchange built as an Ethereum Layer-2 network, saw its LIT token jump after L2BEAT said users can now independently check whether withdrawals can work without relying on the project team.
LIT, the token tied to the Lighter ecosystem, rose more than 19% over 24 hours after the update and traded around $1.17, according to data from CoinGecko.
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The move came after L2BEAT, a research site that tracks Ethereum rollups and scaling networks, said in an X post that it regenerated all ZK circuits, the cryptographic code used to prove Lighter’s transactions and user balances, from the project’s source code.
If Lighter’s sequencer, the system that orders transactions on the network, fails or acts badly, users need a backup way to prove their balances on Ethereum and withdraw funds on their own. The team wrote:
“For the first time, all ZK circuits used by Lighter perp DEX L2 were regenerated from sources by L2BEAT! Now you don’t have to trust the Lighter team to perform a permissionless emergency exit.”
LIT Gets Post-Toly Bounce
A week earlier, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly questioned Lighter on X and called it “just a CEX,” while he was also promoting Phoenix, a Solana-based perpetuals DEX that has been pitched as a rival to Hyperliquid and Lighter.
L2BEAT noted that Lighter hadn’t previously published the source code for its desert verifier, the system used to prove user balances during an emergency withdrawal, so now the team has checked that they “really correspond to the deployed verifier contract.”
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