Lighter’s LIT launch has shaken up the perp DEX landscape — but not in a neat, definitive way. The Ethereum-based, privacy-focused perpetuals exchange distributed roughly $625 million in LIT tokens to early users, a move that drove both heavy trading and intense scrutiny over whether “airdrop farmers” would pack up and move on.
Big withdrawals after the TGE
- Analytics firm Bubblemaps flagged a dramatic outflow the day after LIT’s token generation event (TGE): about $250 million was pulled from the DEX. After accounting for new deposits, the net outflow was roughly $101 million.
- Bubblemaps asked the obvious question: “Are all the farmers leaving?” Some community members pushed back, calling the withdrawals “normal,” given the scale of the airdrop (one user referenced a $650M distribution). Others suggested the money pulled was coming from liquidity providers rather than active traders.
Volumes slide, but so do rivals
- Lighter’s weekly perpetual volumes plunged from $66 billion in late November to $31 billion by late December — a roughly 50% drop.
- But the story isn’t unique to Lighter: Hyperliquid’s perp volumes also fell, from $41 billion to $26 billion over the same period. That complicates the narrative that farmers simply migrated en masse to Hyperliquid (HYPE).
Price action and market sentiment
- The LIT token sold off after launch, sliding about 32% from $3.30 to $2.20 amid selling pressure tied to the airdrop. It later recovered to around $2.60 at the time of reporting (an ~18% bounce).
- Derivatives sentiment leaned short-term bearish: Coinglass data showed 54% of top Binance accounts were shorting LIT versus 45% taking long positions.
Outlook: mixed signals
- Some analysts expect LIT could still rally, pointing to precedent from tokens like HYPE and ASTER after their launches. But with volumes down across multiple perp venues and notable withdrawals following the airdrop, it’s too early to declare a clear winner or to say farming activity has definitively migrated.
Sources: Bubblemaps, Artemis, TradingView, CoinGlass.
Note: This article is informational and not investment advice. Always do your own research before trading.
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