⚠︎ 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/ , /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, not hidden fees or position caps; 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custodians and mirrored 1:1 on ValueChain; a separate docs page still quotes testnet rates (0.05% / 0.02%), superseded by the tier schedule dated 13 March.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 15 venues side by side and the execution-cost tool adds live slippage on top.

Markets they share

In this site's market join, snapshot 2026-09-25, Lighter lists 209 perp markets and SoDEX lists 91; 80 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.
• 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 and access rules are not stated 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

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• Lighter vs Extended
• Lighter vs Pacifica
• Lighter vs GRVT
• Lighter vs Variational
• Lighter vs ApeX Omni
• 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.