Lighter’s LIT token faces $2B–$3B valuation debate after airdrop

Lighter’s LIT token has not yet begun open trading, but the market has already drawn a sharp line around its valuation after Tuesday’s airdrop.

Traders are split on whether the new governance token of the Ethereum-based Layer 2 decentralized exchange (DEX) deserves a fully diluted valuation closer to $2 billion or $3 billion.

Fully diluted valuation, or FDV, estimates a token’s total market value by multiplying its price by the maximum possible supply if all tokens were issued and circulating.

Premarket trading has placed LIT near $3.20, implying an FDV above $3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, while prediction markets tell a more cautious story.

Recent low-float launches like Monad, EigenLayer, and Movement inflated headline valuations into the billions even as most tokens remain locked, leaving FDV to act less as a proxy for real demand and more as a forward-looking estimate that can be easily distorted without close attention to liquidity and tokenomics.

On Polymarket, traders see roughly even odds that LIT exceeds a $3 billion fully diluted valuation a day after launch, while expectations for $4 billion and $6 billion outcomes have faded, with market data showing those higher price targets collapsing after October’s crash.

In comparison, Hyperliquid’s HYPE token debuted at around a $4.2 billion FDV last November.

Dune data shows Lighter has averaged about $2.7 billion in daily perpetuals volume over the past week, placing it behind only Hyperliquid and Aster.