ExchangeOpinion
|6 min ReadRobinhood’s Rare Bet: Inside Lighter and Its Genius Founder
Jax Morales
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Perp DEXs are the hot arena of this cycle. HyperLiquid went viral with no VC money. Aster plugged directly into Binance and rode the giant’s shadow. Lighter picked a different path. It opened the door and let the biggest funds in, including one player that almost never writes venture checks: Robinhood.
Fortune reported that Lighter just raised 68 million dollars, with a cap table straight out of a pitch deck fantasy. Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Haun Ventures, plus Robinhood itself all wrote checks. Capital is not walking in. It is lined up at the door.
Behind that headline round is a very specific founder story and a very specific product: a perp-focused ZK L2 built by a guy who has lived both the trading floor and the codebase for almost 15 years.
From Olympiad prodigy to failed AI pivot to perp DEX killer
Lighter founder Vladimir Novakovski, known as Vlad, grew up in Russia and moved to the United States as a child. While most kids were still memorizing quadratic formulae, he was on the U.S. national teams for the International Olympiads in informatics and physics. At 16 he entered Harvard, graduated in three years, and at 18 was personally invited by Citadel CEO Ken Griffin to join one of the world’s top hedge fund and market-making shops.
Fifteen years as an engineer and trader later, he tried something very different. In 2017, Vlad co-founded AI social platform Lunchclub with Scott Wu. The product raised around 30 million dollars and caught a huge wave during the early COVID period as people rushed online to meet new contacts. By 2022, growth stalled. Vlad says they faced three options: keep it small and profitable, try to force it into a TikTok or Snapchat style growth rocket, or pivot into something they truly cared about.
The co-founders split. Wu left to start AI coding company Cognition, now valued in the tens of billions. Vlad stayed, kept 80 percent of the original team, and turned Lunchclub into Lighter. In 2024, the new Lighter quietly raised 21 million dollars from Haun Ventures and Craft Ventures, with Dragonfly and Robot Ventures joining. That round was not even announced at the time.
Lighter did not start life as a perp chain. It launched at the end of 2022 as a spot DEX on Arbitrum. Only in 2023 did it pivot to perp DEX and start building its own ZK Rollup. The mainnet for its custom L2 only went live in October. In just over a month, that L2 has become the fourth largest by TVL, behind only Arbitrum One, Base, and OP Mainnet. Even long-time OGs like Blue Fox admitted they did not expect a custom L2, tailored to a single exchange, to outrun general purpose L2s this quickly.
A ZK L2 with the exchange logic hardwired into the circuit
When everyone was talking about optimistic rollups, a lot of people said the real endgame would be ZK. That call is now playing out, from Brevis to zkSync’s Airbender. Vlad simply built for that end state from day one.
As both a trader and an engineer, he designed Lighter’s L2 as if he were building a matching engine first and a chain second. The core idea: put matching, risk, and clearing directly into a custom SNARK circuit, then batch the final state to Ethereum L1. The L2 is not just a generic environment that hosts an exchange. The exchange logic is part of the proving system itself.
Lighter calls this architecture Lighter Core. The docs say its scalability comes from a purpose-built proving engine tuned for exchange workloads. New algorithms and data structures are used to generate proofs of exchange operations efficiently. Every operation runs deterministically from user-signed transactions. A batch of those transactions produces a new post-trade state plus a succinct cryptographic proof.
The sequencer only has sequencing power. It cannot cherry-pick or front-run orders because the matching logic is locked inside the circuit. That is a very strong message to serious traders.
Lighter also leans into a bold fee model. For retail wallets, trading is zero fee, but not zero latency. Taker and maker delays sit around 300 milliseconds and 200 milliseconds. For market makers and high-frequency traders with “pro” accounts, maker and taker fees are 0.002 percent and 0.02 percent, with much lower latency at 0 and 150 milliseconds.
The structure looks a lot like a crypto-native version of Robinhood’s order flow game. Retail gets “free” trading with slower fills. Pros pay for speed and edge. The protocol collects from the pros, not the crowd. High enthusiasm from retail plus profitable high-frequency flow means more volume, more depth, and lower gas per trade as batching efficiency improves.
On top of that sits an aggressive points program. Season two is live now. Retail and market makers both earn points based on volume, open interest, and PnL, with 200,000 total points per week for retail and weekly Friday distribution. Fortune’s report noted that the latest round included token warrants, so it is not hard to guess that points will be a key input for any future airdrop.
Why the smartest money is lining up behind Vlad
This is why top funds are lining up. Vlad has the Olympiad medals, the Harvard story, the Citadel stamp, but more importantly he now has the “failure” of an AI social startup behind him and a product that fits his true domain.
Founders Fund partner Joey Krug said that Vlad and his team account for 85 to 90 percent of their investment decision. That is as close as it gets to saying, “We are betting on this guy.”
According to DeFiLlama, Lighter’s recent perp volumes are already at the top of the board. Some of that is surely airdrop farmers chasing points. That does not change the bigger picture. Many people assumed HyperLiquid had already ended the perp DEX war. The numbers now suggest something else.
The endgame might not be one winner. It might be a handful of hyper-optimized venues. HyperLiquid with no VC. Aster with Binance. And Lighter, backed by the fiercest funds in Silicon Valley plus Robinhood, running a ZK L2 that literally bakes the exchange into the math.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.