Lighter Unveils Multi-Asset Margin Starting With ETH

Decentralized perpetuals exchange Lighter is rolling out Multi-Asset Margin today, enabling traders to post non-USDC assets as collateral for perps trading.

The feature debuts with ETH as the first supported collateral asset, according to Lighter’s documentation. Users deposit a supported asset into their margin balance, and its value, discounted by a loan-to-value haircut, counts toward the account’s margin balance and can be used to open perpetual positions. The upgrade is limited to perpetual futures at launch, with USDC spot trading collateralized by non-USDC assets slated to follow.

Lighter is rolling out the feature with conservative per-user and global supply caps as it onboards additional assets over time, per the docs. Access is restricted to accounts with Unified Trading Accounts enabled, which the team rolled out in February and described at the time as the first phase of a push to allow arbitrary tokens to be used as collateral on the platform.

The documentation highlights two potential use cases. The first is a delta-neutral basis trade, where a user deposits ETH as margin, shorts ETH perps against it, and earns funding. The second is leveraged spot, where deposited ETH is used as margin to buy more spot ETH.

Account risk is tracked through a single unified health check covering both perp positions and spot collateral.

The upgrade arrives as Lighter has lost ground in the perp DEX race since its token launch. The platform currently ranks fourth by 24-hour perp volume at roughly $1.35 billion, per DefiLlama, behind Hyperliquid, Aster, and EdgeX, after leading the market in November and December.

The platform’s LIT token has underperformed since its Dec. 29 debut as airdrop farmers rotated to pre-token competitors, and currently trades at a roughly $930 million valuation.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.