Robinhood's Ethereum Layer 2, built on the Arbitrum stack, reached mainnet around July 1 with tokenized stocks that trade around the clock. For perpetual futures it chose Lighter, a zero-knowledge perp exchange, instead of building its own venue. Robinhood covers gas fees for 90 days, and $11 million in LIT is set aside for user rewards.
Correction, July 4, 2026 Our Lighter tracker page listed its token as expected, and our Backpack page described its token as uncommitted. Both tokens had already launched. Both pages are fixed, and the details are below.
Tokenized stocks are onchain tokens that follow the price of shares. Robinhood has said agent-driven trading features are planned on top of the chain.
A perp, short for perpetual future, is a futures contract with no expiry date. Lighter is a decentralized exchange for them, and its order matching is verified with zero-knowledge proofs. Lighter CEO Vladimir Novakovski confirmed that Robinhood Chain collateral now works for trading perps on the platform.
Deposit collateral such as USDG.
24/7 tokenized stocks, gas covered for 90 days.
zk-verified matching, $11M in LIT rewards.
What went live and how the market reacted
Eligible Robinhood Wallet users can move assets such as the USDG stablecoin into Lighter's smart contracts as margin and trade perpetuals. Robinhood pays the gas fees, the network's transaction costs, for the first 90 days. An allocation of $11 million in LIT, Lighter's token, is earmarked for user rewards.
In our reading, this is a distribution deal. A brokerage wallet sends order flow to a decentralized venue, and perp exchanges compete for that kind of access. We have the launch terms but no usage figures, so how much volume the link brings is still open.
LIT rallied on the news. Reports put the gain between 17 and 24 percent, helped by a tokenomics overhaul announced alongside the integration. Lighter also switched on permanent buybacks and burned its first 15.5 million LIT.
What our tracker got wrong, and what is left to farm
Writing this story sent us back to our own tracker, and two pages failed the check. Our Lighter page showed the status expected and described the token as unlaunched. Lighter had in fact held its token generation event, the day a token first trades, on December 30, 2025. It airdropped 25 percent of supply to participants in its first two points seasons, and LIT has traded publicly since, currently around number 75 by market capitalization.
The Backpack page described a token as uncommitted. BP launched on Solana on March 23, 2026, with a 25 percent community airdrop and no insider allocation. Both pages now show the status ended and list what was distributed.
We print a verification date on every tracker page so that mistakes like these are visible. The sweep meant to catch stale facts missed both pages until today, and the correction note stays on both.
The airdrops for both tokens are finished, but the incentive programs are not. Half of Lighter's total supply sits in its ecosystem bucket, and most of that bucket is still held back for future incentive programs. The Robinhood rewards pool is live now. For farmers already trading perps, that is a funded budget rather than a hypothetical one, and more concrete than most of what a market that has only just turned green offers on speculation alone.
Three things can be checked from here. One is whether Lighter's usage holds once the 90 days of covered gas end. Another is how the $11 million in rewards is paid out. The third is whether the ecosystem bucket funds new incentive programs.
