For most of 2025, Lighter traders lived on a weekly rhythm: trade Wednesday through Tuesday, then refresh the dashboard on Friday to see how many points had landed. That rhythm ended when Season 2 closed in late December and the LIT token went live on December 30, 2025, with a quarter of the supply sent straight to points holders. Search interest in “Lighter Season 2” has not gone away, though, because the same question keeps coming back: what did the old system reward, what got accounts cut, and what should a trader expect if Lighter opens another season?
This guide answers those questions using Lighter’s own documentation and the public record of the LIT launch. It is written for people who trade on Lighter or are thinking about it, not for anyone hoping to find a shortcut.
What Lighter is and why its points drew so much attention
Lighter is a perpetual futures exchange built as an application-specific zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum. Orders are matched by an off-chain engine, and the matching and liquidation logic is proven with ZK proofs that are verified on Ethereum, so the exchange can run a fast central limit order book without asking users to simply trust the operator’s ledger. The project was founded by Vladimir Novakovski and is run from the official site at lighter.xyz, with technical and program details in the Lighter documentation.
The feature that pulled in retail volume was pricing. A Standard account pays no maker or taker fees on perps. The trade-off is latency: taker orders and cancels on Standard accounts carry a 300 millisecond delay, while maker orders are not delayed. Traders who need speed can opt into a Premium account, which pays small fees (listed in the docs at 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker before any discounts) in exchange for much lower taker latency. Zero-fee trading combined with an active points program made Lighter one of the most farmed venues of 2025, which is exactly why its anti-abuse rules matter.
How Season 2 points were actually calculated
Season 1 was the private beta, and its final distribution happened on September 30, 2025. Season 2 began with the public mainnet and used a fixed weekly schedule. According to the retail section of the docs, 200,000 points were distributed to retail traders every Friday, based on activity measured from Wednesday through Tuesday inclusive. Market makers on Premium accounts had a separate allocation.
The retail formula was never published in full, but the docs described its ingredients and several important properties:
- Five scoring categories: trading volume, open interest, funding, liquidations and deleverages, and PnL.
- Non-linear scaling: doubling your volume did not double your points.
- Unequal market weighting: $100 of BTC volume was not worth the same as $100 of volume on a smaller market such as HYPE.
- Mixed time frames: some categories were evaluated daily and others weekly, and some were tracked per market while others were global.
- Quality over quantity: some categories scaled with trading quality, and Premium accounts could see PnL weighted differently.
- No reward for deliberate losses: the docs say plainly that losing money on purpose or getting liquidated on purpose does not earn points.
The practical takeaway was that raw churn was a poor strategy. A trader who held positions, paid or earned funding, and traded several markets with real intent tended to be scored differently from one who flipped the same contract hundreds of times a day.
What got accounts flagged
Lighter’s points page states the core rule in one line: Sybil activity, self-trading and similar behavior do not earn points. The retail docs add that detection runs through automated and semi-automated systems, and that the specific metrics are deliberately not disclosed. Before the token launch, the team also said it was running data analysis to strip Sybil, self-trading and wash-trading points, and that removed points would be returned to the wider community rather than simply deleted.
A few details from the Season 2 rules are worth knowing because they are more specific than the usual “don’t farm” warning:
- Multiple accounts were tolerated up to a limit. The docs allowed a user to run up to 10 accounts without penalty. Going beyond that, or making unrelated wallets behave like one operator, is what detection systems look for.
- Self-trade prevention exists at the matching level. Lighter has a dedicated self-trade prevention mechanism, so trading against your own orders is both blocked in many cases and treated as abuse for points purposes.
- Wash patterns between “friendly” accounts are the classic red flag. Two accounts that repeatedly take opposite sides of each other’s orders at the same size and time look nothing like organic trading, regardless of who owns them.
- Intentional liquidations do not help. Since liquidations were one of the scoring inputs, some farmers tried to manufacture them. The docs closed that door explicitly.
The team also kept discretion to adjust distributions, which in practice means no weekly number was final until the season was settled.
How Season 2 ended: the LIT airdrop
Season 2 ended on December 26, 2025, and LIT launched on December 30, 2025. The token has a supply of 1 billion. Lighter split it evenly between the ecosystem and insiders: 50% for users, partners and growth, and 50% for the team (26%) and investors (24%). Insider allocations carry a one-year lock followed by three years of linear vesting.
Half of the ecosystem share, 25% of total supply, went out at launch to Season 1 and Season 2 points holders. Across both seasons, about 12.5 million points had been distributed, so each point corresponded to roughly 20 LIT on a pro-rata basis. Some coverage ranked the drop among the largest in crypto history by dollar value at launch prices. The tokens were credited to Lighter accounts rather than through a separate claim website, and eligible users had a form, with a December 26 deadline, to split their allocation across multiple wallets. If you never filled it in, the allocation went to your main account.
The other 25% of supply sits in the ecosystem reserve, which Lighter said would fund future points seasons, partnerships and growth programs. Lighter has also said that protocol revenue will be directed to buybacks and growth depending on market conditions, and its docs describe LIT staking as the route to benefits such as access to the Lighter Liquidity Pool.
Is there a Season 3?
At the time of writing, Lighter has not published rules, dates or a weekly pool for a Season 3. Around the token launch, the team made a wordplay change in its announcements that the community read as a Season 3 tease, and several outlets reported it that way, but a tease is not a program. The reserve of 25% of supply is the clearest signal that incentives will continue in some form. How they will be scored, whether they will still be called points, and when they start are open questions.
That means a few things for anyone trading on Lighter right now:
- Activity today may or may not count toward a future program. Nobody outside the team knows whether a future season will look back at past trading or start from a clean slate.
- Any site or Telegram bot claiming to show “your Season 3 points” or “your LIT round 2 allocation” is not an official tool unless Lighter itself links to it.
- The Season 2 rulebook is the best available guide to what Lighter values, simply because it is the only one the team has published in detail.
Trading on Lighter without getting flagged
If you trade on Lighter because you want a cheap, fast perps venue, the following approach keeps you consistent with every rule Lighter has published so far.
- Start from the official app. Open app.lighter.xyz from the official site rather than from a search ad or a link in a reply thread. Connect an Ethereum wallet and deposit USDC through the routes the app lists.
- Pick the account type that fits how you trade. A Standard account suits discretionary traders who can live with a 300 ms taker delay. Premium makes sense mainly for API traders and market makers who need lower latency and will pay fees for it.
- Size positions as if no reward existed. Points in Season 2 were scored on volume, open interest, funding and PnL, not on how much risk you took relative to your account. Leverage that wipes out the account produces liquidations, which the docs say earn nothing when they are deliberate and cost you money either way.
- Keep your account structure simple. One main account plus sub-accounts for separate strategies is normal. Running clusters of wallets that fund each other and trade in lockstep is what detection is designed to catch.
- Never trade against yourself. Whether through sub-accounts or a second wallet, matching your own orders is the single most reliable way to lose eligibility.
- Use API trading honestly. The docs explicitly allow organic strategies via the API. A bot that runs a real strategy is fine; a bot that exists only to generate fills between your own accounts is not.
- Watch the official channels for a new program. Lighter announces changes through its docs and its X account, @Lighter_xyz. If a new season appears, read its rules before changing your behavior.
Risks specific to Lighter
Lighter’s design removes some risks and introduces others. These are the ones that matter most in practice:
- Leverage and liquidation. This is the dominant risk on any perps venue. Fee-free trading makes overtrading cheaper, not safer.
- Funding costs. Holding a crowded position can cost more in funding over a week than you would ever have paid in trading fees.
- LLP exposure. The Lighter Liquidity Pool provides liquidity and absorbs liquidations. Depositors share in its gains and in its losses during sharp market moves, and where pool access is tied to staking LIT, token price risk is added on top.
- Operator and software risk. ZK proofs make the ledger verifiable, but the matching engine and sequencer are still run by Lighter. Outages, bugs in new markets, or upgrade problems are possible, and verifiability does not guarantee uptime.
- Token unlocks. Team and investor LIT begins unlocking after the one-year lock that started at launch. Anyone holding LIT from the airdrop should be aware of that schedule.
- Regional restrictions. Check Lighter’s terms for your jurisdiction before depositing. Using workarounds to access the exchange from a restricted region can put your account and any future rewards at risk.
How to spot fake Lighter claim pages
A large, recent airdrop is the perfect bait for phishing. The LIT distribution did not require visiting a claim website: allocations were credited inside Lighter accounts. That single fact rules out most scams. Watch for these patterns:
- Look-alike domains. The official domains are lighter.xyz and its subdomains such as app.lighter.xyz and docs.lighter.xyz. Variations with extra words, hyphens, or different extensions are not Lighter.
- “Unclaimed LIT” or “Season 2 bonus” messages. There is no second claim window for Season 2 points. A page asking you to sign a transaction to receive one is trying to drain your wallet.
- Fake support in replies and DMs. Accounts that reply to @Lighter_xyz posts offering help or “allocation checkers” are impersonators. Real support will not ask for your seed phrase or for a signature on an unrelated site.
- Permit and approval requests. A legitimate deposit asks you to approve USDC for Lighter’s contracts. A request to approve your entire balance of several tokens to an unknown address is a red flag.
For comparison with how another perps venue handled its token launch, see our GRVT post-TGE guide.
FAQ
Can I still earn Season 2 points?
No. Season 2 ended on December 26, 2025, and its points were converted into the LIT airdrop at launch. Any site offering Season 2 points today is not legitimate.
How much LIT did one point get?
About 12.5 million points shared 25% of the 1 billion LIT supply, which works out to roughly 20 LIT per point. The exact amount per account depended on the final, post-cleanup point balance.
Did self-trading points count toward the airdrop?
Lighter said it would remove Sybil, self-trading and wash-trading points before distribution and return them to the community. Accounts built on those patterns should not expect them to count in any future program either.
Is running several accounts against the rules?
Season 2 rules allowed up to 10 accounts per user without penalty. What triggers detection is coordinated behavior, such as trading between your own accounts or running large wallet clusters.
Will there be another points season?
Lighter has kept 25% of supply for future incentives, but at the time of writing it has not announced a Season 3 or its rules.
Verdict
Season 2 is over, and it ended with one of the most generous distributions of the cycle. The lesson from how it was scored is clear: Lighter rewarded traders who held real positions across several markets and penalized the shortcuts. If you use Lighter today, do it because zero-fee perps with verifiable execution suit the way you trade, keep your account structure clean, and wait for official rules before chasing whatever comes next.
Perpetual futures are high-risk leveraged products, and past airdrops say nothing about future ones. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy LIT or to trade.
