Bitwise has launched the first exchange-traded product tracking Lighter’s LIT token, expanding European access to the decentralized perpetuals sector. The Bitwise Lighter Staking ETP, trading as BLIT on Deutsche Börse Xetra, began trading on September 23 with a 0.85% annual expense ratio.
The product is physically backed by LIT held in cold storage and tracks the Kaiko Lighter Reference Rate. At launch, Bitwise reported $4.74 million in assets under management, with approximately 1.012 million LIT held by custodian BitGo Europe across 202,594 units outstanding, or roughly 4.998 LIT per unit. Despite the 'Staking' in its name, BLIT does not yet stake its holdings. Bitwise said staking will be activated only once the fund reaches a sufficient asset level for efficient operations, but it has not disclosed that threshold.
The launch extends Bitwise’s existing strategy in onchain derivatives. Its Hyperliquid Staking ETP, ticker BHYP, launched on Xetra in April with the same 0.85% fee. That product tracks HYPE and targets a 1% net staking reward before fees. With BLIT, European brokerage investors now have conventional access to two competing onchain perpetual platforms.
Lighter already has meaningful trading activity. DeFiLlama data on September 23 showed about $632 million in perpetual open interest and roughly $1.8 trillion in cumulative perpetual volume. A September 18 snapshot ranked Lighter third among tracked decentralized exchanges with nearly $1.93 billion in daily perpetual volume. Hyperliquid remains larger, representing about 36.5% of tracked onchain perpetual volume on September 9, compared with 8.1% for Lighter.
Lighter has also expanded beyond crypto perpetuals into derivatives referencing traditional assets, including Apple, Amazon and Tesla. By September 23, Lighter’s Apple perpetual had generated about $52.8 million in 30-day volume, while the QQQ perpetual recorded roughly $169.8 million and the Anthropic market about $64.2 million.
Bitwise’s head of Europe, Bradley Duke, said Lighter is bringing assets such as U.S. stocks onto blockchain infrastructure alongside crypto. Lighter founder Vladimir Novakovski described the platform’s goal as bringing institutional-grade perpetual trading fully onchain using zero-knowledge proofs for verifiable execution.
Market reaction was positive. LIT gained 12% in 24 hours to $5.31, with $140.16 million in trading volume and a market capitalization of $1.325 billion. Lighter’s total value locked stood at $744 million at launch. The token’s circulating supply is 250 million LIT out of a maximum supply of 1 billion.
