Lighter launches Lighter EVM, expanding programming capabilities on the high-speed trading ecosystem

Lighter announces Lighter EVM — an EVM-compatible rollup with native interaction capabilities with Lighter infrastructure, allowing mainstream applications to access Lighter’s liquidity and markets directly with low latency, while maintaining a verifiable security mechanism via ZK.

After enabling high-frequency transactions on Ethereum through L2 using a custom ZK circuit, Lighter quickly became one of the networks with the highest TPS and top TVL within just a year. Lighter EVM is considered the next step to expand composability, helping developers build more flexible applications while still leveraging Lighter’s high-performance transaction engine.

Lighter EVM is developed in collaboration with Axiom and uses OpenVM — an extended zkVM — to verify EVM execution in parallel with Lighter’s current specialized ZK circuit system. This architecture optimizes transaction verification performance while adding a general-purpose programming environment for DeFi applications. The project has successfully tested on internal devnets and plans to release the first public version in the coming weeks.

Through a proof aggregation mechanism on Ethereum, Lighter EVM and the Lighter transaction system can be verified together, enabling users to move assets and positions between the two environments within seconds. Upon launch, the network will support reading synchronized state from Lighter and asynchronously writing high-speed data for operations such as staking, order placement, and asset transfers.

Lighter expects Lighter EVM to foster an EVM application ecosystem close to Lighter’s liquidity, including fast deposit and withdrawal bridges, shared collateral between lending and derivatives trading, stablecoins issued directly on this L2, as well as new tokenization models — all aimed at increasing capital efficiency and improving user experience.