After one week since the launch, this is what we know about Lighter now 🧵 1. Price $LIT broke out of the sideways $2.4 - 2.8 range and is now trading around $3.0. That said, volume stayed pretty quiet throughout the week, so breakout isn’t strongly confirmed yet. 2. Buy Back Lighter announced its buyback program, which can be tracked via this address — So far, they bought 180k $LIT ~ $540k ~ 0.018% total supply. — Still have 1.6M USDC ready to buy However, assume that buyback was for 1 week, then at this rate, Lighter can only buy 0.9% total supply or 3.7% circulating supply annually. That’s not a very strong number if the goal is to push price higher. According to DefiLlama, Lighter is doing about $88M in annualized fees. Even in a best-case scenario where they keep this level for the next year and use 100% of fees for buybacks, they’d still only be able to buy roughly 3% of total supply/ year. > In short, the buyback alone doesn’t look like a strong catalyst, even under ideal conditions. 3. Airdrop Pressure According to this data dashboard → qwantify.io/app/lighter/aird… → around 43% of the airdrop tokens have been sold, while 56% are still being held. This doesn’t even account for tokens transferred to other wallets, which could be considered sold, so the actual sell rate might be lower. Compared to most airdrops, this sell-off rate is relatively low. A likely reason is that the TGE price came in well below market expectations, so many airdrop recipients chose to hold instead of selling. > Meaning if price continues to move higher, we might see big sell pressure from these holders. 4. Volume on Lighter Since the TGE on the 30th, Lighter’s trading volume hasn’t dropped. In fact, it has increased. This is largely driven by BTC moving from around 88k to 94k, which helped improve overall market sentiment. That said, Lighter’s operations have held up well post-airdrop, and we can expect sustainable volume going forward. 5. Update on Roadmap In their roadmap, Lighter proposed big milestones like: • ZK EVM • RWA Perps • RWA Spot • Mobile App • Prediction Markets But since TGE there are still no further updates on any of these. The only new is that they listed 3 new equity market: x.com/Lighter_xyz/status/200… 6. Conclusion In conclusion, even though @Lighter_xyz has maintained its business well and there hasn’t been a drop in volume, the current catalysts are still weak, and there’s likely more sell pressure ahead. Our view is to keep $LIT on the watchlist and wait for a more convincing breakout with strong volume, along with clearer and stronger catalysts.