This time, Lighter is opening the door to people who write smart contracts.
At 23:00 Beijing time on October 16, Lighter officially announced that its EVM developer network is live. Built in collaboration with Axiom and powered by OpenVM, it runs in parallel with Lighter Core. According to the official description, the two are designed to settle together on Ethereum ($ETH ) through a zero-knowledge proof.
What can developers do? In addition to deploying contracts with Foundry, Hardhat, Viem, and Ethers, they can read account, balance, position, order, and market data from Core; place, modify, and cancel orders through smart contracts; and transfer assets between the devnet’s L1, Core, and EVM.
This is the part I’m most interested in: trading capabilities are starting to become infrastructure that other contracts can plug into. Whether composable strategies and account-management tools can connect more smoothly is more worth discussing than adding another EVM-compatible label. Of course, that’s a judgment about the potential application space; we’ll have to wait for developers to build things and see what the real demand and user experience are like.
The devnet is currently open, and the team is onboarding developers in batches, with plans to expand access to all developers over the coming weeks. Don’t mistake this stage for a full mainnet launch, and certainly don’t use it to draw conclusions about the token price. I’ll be watching the scope of access, the applications that actually go live, and how exceptional orders and asset transfers are handled.
The relevant $ETH spot trading pair was verified against a Binance snapshot as of 2026-10-16 23:09 (Beijing time). Binance spot market/trading page; make your own judgment:
https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/trade/ETH_USDT?type=spot
Organized with AI assistance
For informational purposes only; not investment advice
At 23:00 Beijing time on October 16, Lighter officially announced that its EVM developer network is live. Built in collaboration with Axiom and powered by OpenVM, it runs in parallel with Lighter Core. According to the official description, the two are designed to settle together on Ethereum ($ETH ) through a zero-knowledge proof.
What can developers do? In addition to deploying contracts with Foundry, Hardhat, Viem, and Ethers, they can read account, balance, position, order, and market data from Core; place, modify, and cancel orders through smart contracts; and transfer assets between the devnet’s L1, Core, and EVM.
This is the part I’m most interested in: trading capabilities are starting to become infrastructure that other contracts can plug into. Whether composable strategies and account-management tools can connect more smoothly is more worth discussing than adding another EVM-compatible label. Of course, that’s a judgment about the potential application space; we’ll have to wait for developers to build things and see what the real demand and user experience are like.
The devnet is currently open, and the team is onboarding developers in batches, with plans to expand access to all developers over the coming weeks. Don’t mistake this stage for a full mainnet launch, and certainly don’t use it to draw conclusions about the token price. I’ll be watching the scope of access, the applications that actually go live, and how exceptional orders and asset transfers are handled.
The relevant $ETH spot trading pair was verified against a Binance snapshot as of 2026-10-16 23:09 (Beijing time). Binance spot market/trading page; make your own judgment:
https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/trade/ETH_USDT?type=spot
Organized with AI assistance
For informational purposes only; not investment advice