Lighter has launched an Ethereum-compatible development network with one-second blocks, enabling smart contracts to read trading data, submit orders, and move assets between its EVM environment and its Core order-matching engine. The devnet, built with Axiom and announced on Oct. 16, is being opened to teams in cohorts, with broader access expected in the coming weeks.
According to Axiom’s launch post by Yi Sun, the release includes new instances of Lighter EVM and Lighter Core, the exchange’s order-matching and risk engine. Core runs its own test markets, giving developers an order book to build and test applications. The environment settles to a development L1 instance, with a privately deployed chain standing in for Ethereum as the settlement and data-availability layer. The docs note three limitations: mocked ZK proofs for L1 finalization, a permissionless escape hatch that is not fully functional, and Core read queries that only work at the latest block. Gas is paid in ETH, the EVM chain ID is 19,529, Core uses 300, and the block gas limit is 17 million. Standard JSON-RPC support allows Foundry, Hardhat, Viem, and Ethers.
Contracts can read Core account, balance, position, order, and market data through a synchronous precompile. Trading instructions—placing, modifying, and canceling orders—happen through asynchronous writes that Axiom says execute in seconds. The same connection supports transfers between Lighter EVM and Core, with deposits from the development L1 and withdrawals back. Axiom named fast funding services, vaults, and request-for-quote platforms as possible applications. Lighter already supplies perpetual futures infrastructure to Robinhood Wallet, and earlier coverage noted $7.35 billion in seven-day perpetual volume on Robinhood Chain as of Oct. 9, up 26%. The devnet launch also follows an earlier Upbit listing of Lighter’s LIT token in the South Korean won market.
In a separate infrastructure development, a16z crypto researcher Justin Thaler and co-authors introduced Aerie, a proving system that aggregates post-quantum Falcon signatures into a single computational proof. On a laptop CPU it aggregated 32,768 Falcon-512 signatures in 0.65 seconds, reducing storage to roughly 42.1 bytes per aggregated signature—about 16 times smaller than originals. The lattice-based approach contrasts with hash-based systems such as Ethereum’s leanVM. The research code is on GitHub with collaboration from LayerZero Labs. Aerie has trade-offs: the prover must hold all signatures in memory, peaking at 2.1 GiB for 32,768 signatures, and proofs cannot currently be merged recursively.
The announcements highlight ongoing work to make proof-of-stake networks quantum-safe without exploding bandwidth and node costs, while also opening Lighter’s derivatives infrastructure to broader developer access.
