Lighter wallet

What is Lighter (LIT)?

Lighter runs a perpetual futures exchange on its own zero-knowledge rollup anchored to Ethereum. The matching engine and liquidation logic run off-chain for speed, and every batch of trades comes with a validity proof that Ethereum checks, so the order book cannot quietly execute something the rules do not allow. LIT is the token of that exchange: a standard ERC-20 on Ethereum mainnet, one of whose roles is governance of the protocol.

What holding LIT actually involves

Two things trip new holders up. First, the LIT in your wallet and a trading account on Lighter are separate. The exchange settles positions in USDC that you deposit into its rollup; keeping LIT on an Ethereum address does not open a position, does not margin anything and does not sit inside the exchange at all. Trading and holding the token are two different balances in two different places.

Second, the ticker is not unique. An older, unrelated ERC-20 also traded under LIT on Ethereum before that project rebranded, and its contract still exists. When adding the token, check that the contract belongs to Lighter and not to the older project with the same three letters.

Transfers of LIT are ordinary Ethereum transactions: the fee is paid in ETH, so the address needs a small ETH balance to move the token. There is no rebase, no wrapping and no separate token account to create; the balance only changes when you send or receive.

For most people LIT is a governance position that sits still for months between votes, which is the kind of key that suffers from being typed into things. In Tangem the private key is generated inside the card's chip and never leaves it, and the backup is a second identical card rather than a seed phrase on paper. That matches how LIT tends to be held: rarely signed, kept a long time.

Supported networks in Tangem (2): Ethereum, Robinhood.