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 Revenue Methodology

## 1. Overview

The portion of fees retained by Lighter, as determined by the protocol's take rate, is measured by the Revenue metric. These earnings are derived from exchange activity on the order book platform, specifically encompassing both maker and taker fees. Since 100% of the fees generated on the Lighter chain are accrued to the protocol, revenue is equated to the total fees collected.

## 2. Data sources

- **Blockchain events**: Daily exchange metrics, including maker and taker fee totals, are retrieved from the Lighter API, covering the Lighter chain
- **External data**: End-of-day price feeds are utilized for asset valuation and USD normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Exchange fee extraction

- **Purpose**: Daily fee totals are captured from the exchange to establish the basis for revenue.
- **Logic**: Daily metrics are ingested from the Lighter exchange metrics API. Total fee values are identified as the sum of maker fees and taker fees. To ensure data integrity, only the most recent record for each day is retained, and values are normalized by decimal precision.
- **Key fields**: `maker_fee_usd`, `taker_fee_usd`, `total_fees_usd`

### Component B: Revenue determination

- **Purpose**: The protocol's share of generated fees is established.
- **Logic**: All fees generated on the Lighter platform are categorized as revenue, as no portion is distributed to supply-side participants or external liquidity providers. Revenue is calculated by mapping the total fee value directly to the revenue metric, reflecting a 100% take rate.
- **Key fields**: `fees`, `revenue`

### Component C: Normalization and aggregation

- **Purpose**: Data is formatted for consistent reporting and cross-chain comparison.
- **Logic**: Revenue values are aggregated at a daily granularity with UTC day boundaries. Any dates missing data are filled with zero values to maintain a continuous time series. Final values are cast to bignumeric format to ensure high-precision calculations.

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

fees * take_rate (illustrative — revenue is observed directly per project, not derived from take_rate)

Fee revenue retained after supply-side payouts. Before cost of revenue (e.g. L2 DA fees) and before operating expenses.

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