The Founder of the Perpetual Futures Exchange Lighter on Leveraging Hyperliquid's Success

Hyperliquid may be the hottest name in crypto trading today, but the founder of decentralized perpetual futures exchange Lighter, Vlad Novakovski, doesn't see the future as a winner-take-all battle between decentralized exchanges.

In fact, he thinks the real competition isn't happening between projects like Lighter and Hyperliquid at all.

"The reality is that there are a lot of really strong builders in DeFi," Novakovski told Coinage . "Any of these strong decentralized projects should grow relative to more centralized exchanges."

It's a notable answer at a time when crypto traders have become obsessed with league tables. Hyperliquid has emerged as one of the biggest success stories of the cycle, generating billions in volume and proving that decentralized trading can compete with centralized exchanges on speed and user experience. But Novakovski argues that the market opportunity remains much larger than any one protocol — or token.

Over the last three months both Hyperliquid's native token and Lighter's have enjoyed nice rallies. HYPE is up more than 60% since March, while LIT has rallied by more than 40% over the same time frame. Arguably, Hyperliquid garnering attention for their version of a perpetual futures exchange has now also thrust Lighter into the spotlight.

The bigger question, he says, is whether decentralized infrastructure has finally matured enough to take meaningful market share from incumbents. And after spending more than three years building on Ethereum, he believes the answer is finally yes.

"We're only using 1% of Ethereum blob space," Novakovski said. "We can actually scale another 100x from here."

For years, Ethereum scaling lived largely in the realm of theory. Developers promised that rollups and zero-knowledge proofs would eventually unlock exchange-grade performance while preserving Ethereum's security guarantees. Today, Novakovski says those promises are becoming reality.