⚠︎ Risk warning: leveraged derivatives on unregulated platforms — you can lose everything you deposit. Not investment advice.

Comparison · By Stephan Kulik · Updated 2026-09-25

Lighter vs SoDEX (2026): Zero Fees vs Custodied Book

Both run a public order book and both carry stock and commodity perps beside crypto. They split on cost and on where the money sits. Lighter is a zero-knowledge rollup on Ethereum whose Standard accounts pay nothing on either side. SoDEX matches on a perps appchain of SoSoValue's ValueChain, charges from 0.040% taker and 0.012% maker, and holds deposits with institutional custodians, giving you a mirrored token to trade.

At a glance

✓ facts verified 2026-09-25 · each venue's official docs Every cell restates a claim on one of this site's pages: /compare/hyperliquid-vs-lighter/ , /lighter/fees/ , /eu/lighter/ , /sodex/ , /sodex/how-to-start/ , /sodex/fees/ , /airdrops/ .

Fees

Lighter — Order-book; zero-fee Standard accounts, paid Premium tier for lower latency, Plus tier for higher rate limits. Base tier: 0% (Standard) / 0.0280% (Premium) taker, 0% (Standard) / 0.0040% (Premium) maker. Numerics reflect Standard accounts (zero-fee); Premium trades 0.0040%/0.0280% with a LIT-staking discount grid. Discounts: LIT staking reduces Premium rates on a published grid. Standard’s trade-off is latency (300ms taker) and API rate limits rather than fees, except TWAP orders, which carry a 1 bp fee on Standard per the API docs; LIT is live (staking discounts the Premium grid) and the points program remains a separate, conversion-undocumented track. Schedule verified 2026-09-16 on /lighter/fees/.

SoDEX — Order-book maker/taker on SoSoValue's ValueChain; seven tiers on 14-day weighted volume (perps + 2× spot). Base tier: 0.040% → 0.022% (by tier) taker, 0.012% → 0% (by tier) maker. Numerics are tier 0 (≤ $5,000,000 of 14-day weighted volume); the public perps API carries the same 0.0004 / 0.00012 on every market. Discounts: Staking SOSO takes 5% to 40% off; makers above 0.50% / 1.50% / 3.00% of 14-day maker volume earn −0.001% / −0.002% / −0.003% instead of the tier maker fee. Deposits are held by institutional custodians and mirrored 1:1 on ValueChain; a separate docs page still quotes testnet rates (0.05% / 0.02%), superseded by the tier schedule dated 13 March. Schedule verified 2026-09-24 on /sodex/fees/.

Base-tier rates answer one narrow question — what a small taker order costs on day one. Your maker/taker mix, volume tier and holding period decide the real number; the fee comparison lays all 20 venues side by side and the execution-cost tool adds live slippage on top.

Markets they share

In this site's market join, snapshot 2026-10-07, Lighter lists 209 perp markets and SoDEX lists 92; 81 appear on both. The market index shows every asset with the venues that list it and each venue's published leverage, and the join is refreshed weekly by a fail-closed pipeline. Breadth is not depth: a listing says nothing about how much size a book absorbs, which the execution-cost tool measures live where a venue publishes its order book.

Token and points

• Lighter: LIT · live. Points: Unverified — Points Season 2; Retail track: 200,000 points/week, distributed Fridays for Wednesday – Tuesday activity. The docs do not state what points redeem for, and no points-to-LIT conversion is documented. LIT is live and bought back from fee revenue. The market-makers page says "Points Season 2 ended on December 26th 2025"; the retail page and the overview still describe weekly Season 2 distribution and have not been updated with an end date. The docs do not say whether the retail track continues, so the status stays unverified until they do. Separately, the docs carry a "Lighter on Robinhood Chain Points" programme (terms effective 10 August 2026, weekly drops from Friday 21 August) whose page does not mention LIT; the 11 million LIT conversion pool for it is stated by Robinhood, not by Lighter's docs.
• SoDEX: SOSO · live (ValueChain gas and governance). Points: Active — SoPoints — Layer 1 Season (from 1 September 2026, 20 weeks); Earned from spot and futures volume and open interest, Wealth and SLP vault holdings, and invites (25% of invitees’ points); squad and early-bird boosts stack to +70%. Season 1 (1 February – 1 August 2026) paid 1,000,000 SoPoints a week; weighting is "fine-tuned weekly" and unpublished. Docs: SoPoints "will directly determine your allocation weight in the future $SOSO token airdrop". No conversion ratio is published. The airdrop destination is named but its size and ratio are not; treat points as an unquantified claim until SoDEX publishes one.

Both rows are restated from the points & airdrop tracker, which is re-read against each venue's docs on a 45-day cadence and never prices a point.

Where Lighter wins

Fees, settlement and the shelf. Standard accounts pay nothing on every market, with a paid Premium tier only for latency-sensitive flow. Funds settle on a rollup that posts validity proofs to Ethereum rather than sitting with third-party custodians. Lighter's market list is the longer of the two, with more stock-tagged contracts. LIT is live. Lighter's docs describe wallet-based onboarding and state no identity step — recorded as unverified rather than promised.

Where SoDEX wins

Published leverage and collateral options. SoDEX's market list states a maximum leverage for every market, where Lighter's list, as this site reads it, publishes none. Cross margin can count BTC, ETH, gold and other assets as collateral at a haircut, and deposits arrive from each asset's native chain without bridging yourself. SOSO staking cuts fees, and makers with a high share of volume earn rebates. The Hyperliquid vs SoDEX page covers the custody model in detail.

What this site could not verify

• Lighter: KYC — no statement either way in the docs this site verified.
• Lighter: Whether Points Season 2 is still running: the market-makers page says it ended on 2025-12-26, the retail page has not been updated.
• Lighter: What points redeem for — no points-to-LIT conversion is documented.
• SoDEX: Who, if anyone, operates the venue — the only named company disclaims it, and the site footer links another product’s Terms.
• SoDEX: ETH maximum leverage — 25x on the docs’ Margin Tiers page, 40x on the API.
• SoDEX: The SoPoints-to-SOSO conversion and the weighting formula — neither is published.

Which to pick

For the lowest cost, the wider shelf and Ethereum-anchored settlement, Lighter. For a published per-market leverage cap and multi-asset collateral, and after accepting that deposits sit with named custodians, SoDEX. Both bar the United States; SoDEX's Terms also exclude China, Singapore, the United Kingdom and others. The Lighter review and the SoDEX review carry the detail behind each cell.

Related comparisons

• Lighter vs Aster
• Lighter vs dYdX
• Lighter vs edgeX
• Lighter vs Paradex
• Lighter vs Extended
• Lighter vs Pacifica
• Lighter vs GRVT
• Lighter vs Variational
• Lighter vs ApeX Omni
• Lighter vs Veranta
• Lighter vs Nado
• Lighter vs Vest Markets
• Lighter vs Derive
• Lighter vs Ondo Perps
• Hyperliquid vs Lighter
• Hyperliquid vs SoDEX

FAQ

How far apart are the fees?

At the entry level, all of SoDEX's fee: Lighter Standard charges 0% and SoDEX tier 0 charges 0.040% taker and 0.012% maker. SoDEX's staking discount and maker rebates narrow that gap only for stakers and high-share makers.

Which is safer to hold a balance on?

On the evidence this site has, Lighter: its settlement rolls up to Ethereum with validity proofs. SoDEX's docs state that deposited assets are held in segregated accounts at institutional custodians and represented on-chain by mirrored tokens.

Do they list the same markets?

Largely. The shared-markets count above comes from this site's coverage snapshot, which reads both venues' public market lists; Lighter's list is the longer of the two.