Lighter Launches Lighter EVM to Expand DeFi Infrastructure

Lighter announced on January 31, 2026, the launch of Lighter EVM, a major platform upgrade that marks its transition from a high-performance trading engine into a broader decentralized finance infrastructure.

The new Ethereum Virtual Machine support enables developers to deploy general-purpose smart contracts directly on Lighter, expanding its role within the DeFi ecosystem.

The upgrade connects application logic with Lighter’s existing spot and perpetual markets, allowing liquidity and trading activity to operate within a shared environment. The move reflects rising demand for infrastructure that unifies execution, liquidity, and programmability without sacrificing speed or verifiability.

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DeFi Applications Integrated With Trading Liquidity

With the introduction of Lighter EVM, decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and other DeFi applications can now operate alongside Lighter’s core trading markets. This design allows capital to serve multiple purposes simultaneously instead of remaining fragmented across separate platforms.

By consolidating trading and DeFi activity within a single system, Lighter aims to improve capital efficiency and reduce incentive misalignment that often emerges across multi-chain environments. Developers benefit from a familiar EVM framework, while users gain access to tighter composability between applications and on-chain liquidity.

Lighter explained that the upgrade aims to facilitate more complex DeFi interactions without compromising execution speed. Further research is being carried out to reduce latency and improve execution speed optimizations.

Zero-Knowledge Architecture Ensures Verifiable Performance

Lighter EVM is built as an EVM-equivalent rollup in collaboration with OpenVM. The architecture enables smart contracts to interact directly with Lighter’s markets, rather than operate in isolated execution layers. An OpenVM-based sidecar integrates with Lighter’s existing zero-knowledge circuits to enable this interaction.

All activity in Lighter EVM is still verifiable via zero-knowledge proofs. Extensions of OpenVM are customized according to the Plonky2 proof system to facilitate recursive aggregation of the proof and joint verification of smart contract execution and market state.

As the project states, OpenVM 2.0 will verify Lighter EVM, ensuring real-time performance with provable soundness for trading and DeFi activity.

Why This Matters

Lighter EVM eliminates the trade-off between speed and programmability, offering a high-performance trading infrastructure with Ethereum-compatible smart contracts.

The upgrade presents an opportunity for the trend toward shared liquidity and unified execution to have a significant impact on the interaction between trading and DeFi applications.

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