The Lighter airdrop: LIT recap, points and price since

Lighter airdropped its LIT token on December 30, 2025, sending 250 million LIT (25% of the 1 billion supply) to users who earned points in its 2025 Season 1 and Season 2 programs. About 12.5 million points were converted, so each point was worth roughly 20 LIT, credited automatically with no claim or lock. LIT traded around $3.55 on October 4, 2026. Lighter has not announced a further airdrop season.

The LIT airdrop at a glance

Token launch and airdrop	December 30, 2025
Total supply	1,000,000,000 LIT
Airdrop size	250,000,000 LIT (25%)
Points converted	About 12.5 million (Seasons 1 and 2)
Implied rate	About 20 LIT per point
Claim	None, credited automatically
Lock on airdropped tokens	None

The supply split and launch date come from The Block’s launch report. The 12.5 million points figure was reported by several outlets at launch. Lighter hasn’t published a per-point rate, so the 20 LIT figure is our division of 250 million by 12.5 million.

LIT tokenomics

Allocation	Share	Unlock
Ecosystem: initial airdrop	25%	Unlocked on December 30, 2025
Ecosystem: future points seasons, partnerships, growth	25%	At Lighter’s discretion
Team	26%	One-year lock, then three-year linear vesting
Investors	24%	One-year lock, then three-year linear vesting

Unlike Hyperliquid, Lighter has venture backers. It raised $68 million in November 2025 in a round led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital, Cointelegraph reported. Half of supply belongs to insiders, and their one-year lock runs until around the end of December 2026.

How Lighter’s points seasons worked

Season 1 covered Lighter’s private beta and ended with the final distribution on September 30, 2025, according to the points program docs.

Season 2 ran from October to December 26, 2025, with points distributed every Friday:

• Retail traders shared 200,000 points a week. The retail page lists volume, open interest, funding, liquidations and deleverages, and PnL among the inputs, with market weights and scaling factors for trading quality. Points weren’t linear: doubling volume didn’t necessarily double points.
• Market makers on Premium accounts shared 50,000 points a week (20% of the 250,000 total), based on maker volume and the quality of resting liquidity.

Lighter said self-trading and sybil activity wouldn’t earn points, while allowing up to 10 accounts per person without penalty. Before the airdrop, a core contributor said the team was running data science to strip sybil, self-trading and wash-trading points from the totals.

Eligibility and claiming

Anyone with points after the sybil filter was eligible. In the week before launch, Lighter opened an allocation form that let users direct tokens to up to four additional wallets, per Cointelegraph. On launch day, LIT appeared in users’ Lighter accounts automatically. There was no claim page to visit, which also meant any “LIT claim” site was a scam by definition.

What the LIT airdrop was worth

Date	LIT price	Value of 250M airdropped LIT	1,000 points (about 20,000 LIT)
Dec 30, 2025 (daily close)	about $2.73	about $680M	about $54,500
Mar 31, 2026 (cycle low)	about $0.81	about $200M	about $16,200
Mid-September 2026	about $4.39	about $1.1B	about $87,800
Oct 4, 2026	about $3.55	about $890M	about $71,000

Prices are daily data from CoinGecko. LIT traded in a pre-market on Hyperliquid before launch at around $3.25, and The Block recorded about $2.34 in the first hours of spot trading, so launch-day prices swung widely. CoinGecko lists an all-time low of $0.78 on March 31, 2026.

The worked example uses the implied 20 LIT per point. If your own allocation doesn’t match, the reason is usually sybil adjustments or how points were split across wallets via the allocation form.

Why the price fell, then recovered

The first quarter of 2026 was rough. Airdrop recipients sold, and LIT lost around 70% from its launch-day close by late March.

Two things supported the recovery:

• Buybacks. Lighter began buying LIT with exchange revenue in early January 2026, DL News reported. Lighter’s LIT utility page describes daily 24-hour TWAPs funded by trading fees.
• Burns. After a mid-2026 tokenomics change, bought-back LIT is burned instead of held. Reports in July 2026 put the first burn of this kind at roughly 15.6 million LIT.

Staking demand helps too. LIT stakers earn a fixed 6% APR, get exclusive access to the LLP pool (up to 10 USDC per LIT staked) and cut Premium trading fees by up to 30%. Our Lighter fees guide shows those staking tiers.

Is there another Lighter airdrop coming

Here’s the honest picture as of October 2026.

What’s known:

• 25% of LIT supply is reserved for future points seasons, partnerships and growth.
• Lighter still pays incentives in LIT. Its Liquidity Partner Program pays market makers weekly in LIT.
• A separate Lighter on Robinhood Chain points program started in August 2026, with the first weekly drop on August 21. Its terms exclude users in the US, UK, Canada and a list of other countries.

What isn’t known:

• Whether there will be a Season 3 on the main exchange, and when.
• What Robinhood Chain points will convert into, if anything. The program terms don’t mention a token allocation.
• How much of the remaining 25% goes to traders versus partnerships.

Points programs are discretionary. Lighter’s terms let it remove or reverse points at any time, including after a program ends.

Lighter vs Hyperliquid: how the two airdrops compare

	Hyperliquid (HYPE)	Lighter (LIT)
Date	Nov 29, 2024	Dec 30, 2025
Airdrop share	31%	25%
Reserved for future community rewards	38.888%	25%
Team and investors	23.8% team, no VCs	26% team, 24% investors
Claim	Automatic	Automatic
First months	Rose about 10x within a month	Fell about 70% within three months

Both teams skipped the claim page and gave a large share to real users. The big difference is insiders: HYPE has no investor allocation, while half of LIT supply sits with the team and VCs and starts unlocking from late 2026. Our HYPE airdrop recap covers the Hyperliquid side in detail.

How people use Lighter today

Without a live main-exchange points season, the reasons to use Lighter are practical:

• Zero-fee trading. Standard accounts pay 0% maker and taker in exchange for a short delay on taker orders. Our explainer on what Lighter is covers how the ZK architecture and custody work.
• Premium for speed. Faster execution costs 0.0040% maker and 0.0280% taker before LIT staking discounts. A Lighter referral code gives new accounts a free week of Premium, with fees rebated on the first $10M of volume.
• Staking LIT for the APR, LLP access and fee discounts, with a 3-day unstaking lockup and full exposure to LIT’s price.

If you want to see the platform for yourself, open a Lighter account, deposit a small amount and compare execution with what you use now. For the head-to-head on fees, custody and liquidity, see Hyperliquid vs Lighter.