Verified from Lighter's daily share prices · as of Oct 30, 2026
Lighter public pools: 9 of 13 beat BTC, 8 fell more than 30%
Public pools let anyone deposit with a trader, a team or a bot on Lighter, a perpetual futures exchange that settles to Ethereum. We pull every open pool with $10k or more and compute its return, its worst drawdown and how it did against BTC from Lighter's own daily share prices. No screenshots, no backtests, nothing self-reported.
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Held up: max drawdown under 30%
| Pool | TVL | Return | BTC, same dates | Max drawdown | Sortino | Last 30 days | Pool vs BTC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edge & Hedge (L/S Factors) | $1.7M | +41.1% | −28.1% | −26.3% | 1.63 | +5.4% | |
| BTC vs ALTS and NEWS/DIPS | $409k | +22.3% | −28.1% | −14.8% | 2.48 | 0.0% | |
| Christ is King | $146k | +17.9% | −2.1% | −8.5% | 7.15 | −0.8% | |
| Steady Wealth Builder | $75k | +20.7% | +12.4% | −8.2% | 4.83 | +4.6% | |
| Candle Effect v2 | $59k | +18.2% | +3.2% | −2.3% | 12.14 | +2.9% |
Fell more than 30%
| Pool | TVL | Return | BTC, same dates | Max drawdown | Sortino | Last 30 days | Pool vs BTC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guinea Pool | $83k | −87.4% | −28.1% | −90.7% | -0.95 | −58.4% | |
| Insertive Capital (@onchainquant) | $32k | −64.4% | −28.1% | −88.2% | 0.45 | −59.8% | |
| [ Systemic Strategies ] Peter Schiff's vault | $434k | −79.9% | +14.5% | −80.2% | -2.90 | −33.7% | |
| FLEXIBLE POOL | $84k | +52.6% | −28.1% | −61.5% | 1.38 | −20.5% | |
| NYP- Not YOUR pool | $752k | +5.0% | −18.3% | −53.4% | 0.85 | −1.8% | |
| NK pool | $39k | +94.8% | +1.2% | −40.8% | 3.27 | +8.7% | |
| pmalt | $54k | −18.8% | −2.8% | −35.9% | -0.81 | −12.3% | |
| K Pool | $36k | +818.1% | −28.1% | −35.2% | 4.51 | 0.0% |
Protocol pools, for reference
| Pool | TVL | Return | BTC, same dates | Max drawdown | Sortino | Last 30 days | Pool vs BTC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lighter Liquidity Provider (LLP) | $86.2M | +11.7% | −28.1% | −0.5% | 17.54 | +1.0% | |
| LLP | $2.1M | +122.3% | +29.9% | −8.0% | 15.01 | +12.9% | |
| Experimental Liquidity Provider (XLP) | $40k | −53.6% | −28.1% | −71.3% | -1.39 | 0.0% |
How Lighter compares with Hyperliquid, dYdX, Paradex and other perp DEXs for bots: best perp DEXs for trading bots.
FAQ
Do Lighter public pools make money?
Of the 13 open Lighter public pools with $10k or more, 9 returned more than BTC over the same dates and 8 fell more than 30% from a peak at some point. Returns are the pool's own, from Lighter's daily share prices, before the operator's profit fee. See the tables for each pool.
What is the LLP?
The Lighter Liquidity Provider is the protocol pool Lighter runs itself, open to deposits. Over the same kind of window it returned +11.7% with a 0.5% max drawdown. It is run by the protocol, so we show it as a reference and never rank it with user pools.
Where do these numbers come from?
From Lighter's public API, which needs no login: the list of public pools, each pool's daily share price and its daily pool shares. We compute every number ourselves. Nothing is self-reported by the operators, and backtests in pool descriptions never count.
Is it safe to deposit?
The operator can trade the pool's money however they like within Lighter's rules, and the exchange itself has risks (see Security). Only deposit what you can lose, and check you're on the real site first: check Lighter's official links.
Method, security and limits
Security: what you're trusting with a pool
A pool is only as safe as the exchange it runs on, and the security rating is never mixed into the performance numbers: a big return can't make up for weak security. Lighter isn't scored in our directory yet, so here are the facts from our Lighter check page, each with its source.
- Custody: You sign with your own Ethereum wallet. Deposits sit in Lighter's Ethereum smart contracts, which 'hold the assets and the canonical state root'; the order book and matching run off-chain on Lighter's single operator/sequencer, and each batch is proven with zero-knowledge proofs on Ethereum. (L2BEAT)
- Getting your money out: Normal 'secure' withdrawals go back to the Ethereum address that created the account. If the sequencer ignores you, you can post a priority (forced) transaction on Ethereum; if it is not processed within 14 days, anyone can trigger the escape hatch ('desert mode'), which freezes the L1 contract and lets users withdraw by submitting a zero-knowledge proof of their balance. The desert-exit circuit was audited by zkSecurity (report dated 2025-11-05, source), but L2BEAT notes its source code is not public.
- Freezes and upgrades: No KYC-style account freeze is described, but Lighter's terms let it 'suspend or terminate your access to the Interface' without notice (source). The escape hatch only kicks in after a 14-day forced-transaction deadline, so funds can be stuck for up to two weeks if the operator stops or censors. L2BEAT rates Lighter Stage 0 (May 2026): the team controls the contract upgrade path, and L2BEAT's project page says contracts are instantly upgradable, so a malicious upgrade could steal funds before users exit (source, preview build).
- Pools: the operator trades the pool's money through a sub-account and takes a share of profits when depositors withdraw; Lighter sets a minimum share of the pool the operator must own (Lighter docs).
Incidents on record:
- Feb 25, 2026: ARC perpetual long squeeze: a whale's ~$50M open-interest long was liquidated and auto-deleveraging (ADL) partially closed profitable shorts. LLP loss capped by the per-market risk bucket; Lighter set a $40M open-interest cap on ARC and said similar caps may apply to other assets (source)
- Oct 10, 2025: About 4.5-hour outage during the market-wide crash: a database upgrade problem left the single sequencer unable to process trades, so users could not manage positions and the LLP lost about 5.35%. Lighter said it would fully compensate the 2,000+ affected users in stablecoins and points (source)
How we compute the numbers
- Who is included: every open (not frozen) public pool on Lighter with $10k or more and at least 30 days of history in the window, on Lighter and on Lighter on Robinhood Chain (which has 1 public pool so far). Protocol pools are shown as references.
- Window: the last 365 days, or from the first day the pool held $10,000 (pool shares times the share price that day), so a tiny start can't inflate the return.
- Return: last share price divided by the first, minus one. A share price already leaves out deposits and withdrawals. It's before the operator's profit fee, which Lighter takes when you withdraw.
- Max drawdown: the worst fall from a peak in the daily share price. Worse than 30% puts a pool in the second table.
- Sortino ratio: average daily return divided by the downside deviation, annualized.
- Benchmark: BTC over the same dates, from Hyperliquid's BTC daily close, as on our other boards.
Limits
- Survivorship: frozen pools and pools that closed before Oct 30, 2026 aren't in the tables, so the list looks better than all pools did.
- A share price can move a lot in one day when a pool is small; the $10,000 start and the † flag are there for that.
- Past results don't predict future results. An operator can change strategy or leverage at any time.