Lighter generates revenue through trading fees charged to takers on its on-chain order book. The protocol retains all fees as revenue.

Lighter is an app-specific zk-rollup (L2) purpose-built for order book trading. It operates its own chain with a custom execution environment, settling to Ethereum. The protocol supports perpetual futures and spot markets with sub-second finality and zero MEV.

Lighter team and investors own and govern the protocol. Lighter's investors include a16z, Lightspeed, Coatue, etc.

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Lighter

# Lighter Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

Fees measures the total value paid by users to execute trades on Lighter. This metric includes the sum of all maker and taker fees collected across all trading pairs and order books on the platform. These fees represent the total economic value generated by the exchange infrastructure and are used to assess the protocol's ability to monetize trading activity.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Daily exchange metrics and trade events aggregated from the Lighter network
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds and USD-denominated exchange metrics

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Exchange fee extraction

- **Purpose**: Capture total maker and taker fees generated by market activity
- **Logic**: USD-denominated fee values are extracted from daily exchange metrics. This includes the collection of both maker and taker fee components from all active markets. The `total_fees_usd` field is utilized to represent the aggregate value of these fees for each reporting period.
- **Key fields**: `maker_fee_usd`, `taker_fee_usd`, `total_fees_usd`

### Component B: Daily record selection

- **Purpose**: Ensure data integrity and prevent double-counting from multiple data ingestions
- **Logic**: Records are partitioned by day based on their timestamps. In instances where multiple data points exist for the same 24-hour period, the most recent entry is selected based on its insertion timestamp. This ensures that only the most up-to-date and validated metrics are used in the final calculation.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `inserted_at`

### Component C: Normalization and aggregation

- **Purpose**: Standardize fee data into a continuous daily time series
- **Logic**: Fee values are aggregated at a daily granularity with UTC day boundaries. For dates where no trading activity is recorded by the exchange metrics, the values are filled with zeros to maintain a continuous historical record. All values are finalized as USD-denominated amounts.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `fees`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

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Fees

Fees

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Chain breakdown