Lighter vs Axiom

Lighter

A Standard account, the default, pays no maker or taker fee on perpetuals or spot. The trade-off is speed: Standard orders wait 300 ms before they reach the book, and the Premium account that removes most of that delay pays 0.028% taker and 0.004% maker before staking discounts. Plus accounts pay 0.005% for higher API rate limits. Advanced order types cost 0.01% on a Standard account.

Axiom

Every spot trade pays 1% to Axiom, on every supported chain, before cashback: the SOL rebate runs from 0.05% of trade value at the entry tier to 0.25% at the top, so the net fee is 0.95% to 0.75%, and a referral signup takes a further 10% off. Solana priority fees and bribes, or gas on the other chains, come on top. Perps on Hyperliquid pay 0.01% per transaction plus Hyperliquid's fee and funding. The Terms let fees change without notice and treat the quoted cost as an estimate.

Lighter

You connect a wallet and sign, with no identity check in the official interface. The Terms say the interface logs IP addresses only to enforce the access restrictions and collects no other personal data. The app applies the country list by IP: from a restricted location it shows a restricted-jurisdiction notice and marks the session geo-blocked.

Axiom

You sign up with an email code, a Google account, or a Phantom wallet, set a password, and are shown a recovery phrase. No identity document is asked for, and the wallet keys are yours to export. Buying SOL by debit card or Apple Pay through Coinbase inside the app needs no KYC up to $500 a week, according to Axiom's FAQ, while the MoonPay route verifies identity under MoonPay's rules. The Terms, dated February 26, 2026, reserve the right to run KYC and anti-money-laundering checks at Axiom's discretion, naming passports, driving licences, and utility bills as examples, and the Privacy Policy says wallet addresses are screened for illicit activity.

Lighter

The Terms, last updated December 29, 2025, name fourteen excluded countries: the US, Canada, the UK, China, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Belarus, Myanmar, and Syria, plus any jurisdiction under comprehensive sanctions and anyone on a sanctions list. The interface applies the list by IP address. The separate Lighter on Robinhood Chain deployment also excludes Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE, and South Sudan.

Axiom

The Terms, dated February 26, 2026, name no country. They bar anyone on a US, EU, or UK sanctions list, anyone located in, resident in, or organized in a jurisdiction under comprehensive sanctions or designated as terrorist-supporting by the UN, EU, UK, or US, and anyone under 18, and they let Axiom restrict any person or region at its discretion. Using a VPN to get around a restriction is a breach. The previous Terms, dated February 26, 2025, named the United States, China, Singapore, and sixteen other countries and regions. The current version carries no such list.

Lighter

Maximum leverage is set per market: 50x for BTC and ETH, 25x for SOL, 20x for XRP, HYPE, and BNB, 15x for ARB and OP, 10x or less for most other coins, and 3x for the newest listings. Major FX pairs run up to 25x, gold 15x, silver 10x. You can lower the leverage on any market. Positions are cross-margined unless you set a market to isolated. Pre-launch markets are isolated only. With a Unified Trading Account, ETH and XAUT count as margin at a haircut.

Axiom

Perps run on Hyperliquid, so each market's maximum leverage is Hyperliquid's: a whole number up to a per-asset cap that tops out at 40x on BTC and steps down on large positions, under Hyperliquid's margin rules and hourly funding. Axiom's own perps page, last updated in April 2025, still says up to 50x, but the venue's current cap governs. Open positions show entry, mark, and liquidation prices and take-profit and stop-loss levels in Axiom's perps portfolio.

Lighter

The contract specifications list about 100 crypto perpetuals, and the RWA specifications add roughly 70 more that trade around the clock: gold, silver, copper, oil, gas, FX pairs, US and Asian stocks, ETFs and indexes, and pre-IPO names such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Pre-IPO and pre-launch markets are isolated-margin only, and pre-IPO prices come from Lighter's own pricing mechanism rather than a market feed. A small spot book trades ETH, LIT, and a few other tokens against USDC. Order types: market, limit, stop-loss and take-profit in market or limit form, TWAP, chase limit, atomic basket orders, and RFQ for size, with post-only, reduce-only, good-til-time, and immediate-or-cancel options.

Axiom

Spot trading covers tokens on Solana, where the terminal started, with pump.fun launches, tokens nearing migration, and fresh Raydium pairs surfaced in Pulse, plus the other chains the app lists: BNB Chain (added October 23, 2025), Ethereum, Base, Robinhood Chain, Ink, Arc, and HyperEVM, as shown in the app's chain selector on September 26, 2026. Spot order types are market orders, limit orders, buy-on-migration and sell-on-migration snipes, and auto-strategies that place a buy and its limit orders in one click. The Perpetuals tab opens long or short positions on Hyperliquid's markets.

Lighter

Collateral is USDC. The direct route is a deposit from Ethereum mainnet into the exchange contract, minimum 1 USDC. Lighter's bridge, run with Fun.xyz, an independent provider, gives you a deposit address that accepts USDC, USDT, ETH, and other tokens from Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana, HyperEVM, Monad, Tron, and Bitcoin and credits USDC, with a $5 minimum for a new account ($3 from EVM chains and Solana afterwards, $10 from Bitcoin). The app's deposit notice also lists card and Coinbase deposits. ETH and XAUT can be deposited to the spot balance and, with a Unified Trading Account, posted as margin at a haircut.

Axiom

The Axiom wallet is created at signup, so funding it means sending SOL, or tokens on another supported chain, to the address the app shows. Inside the app, Buy opens Coinbase's checkout for a debit card or Apple Pay purchase of SOL, which Axiom's FAQ says needs no KYC up to $500 a week. Coinbase's own developer docs say its hosted guest checkout was discontinued on June 30, 2026, and Axiom's FAQ still shows the $500 figure. MoonPay has been a second route since October 2025, taking cards, bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo under MoonPay's identity checks. Perps collateral is separate: you convert SOL into USDC on Hyperliquid from the wallet menu, which takes about five minutes.

Lighter

Two routes. A secure withdrawal is proven to Ethereum and then claimable there. Lighter says it usually claims on your behalf unless gas is high, and the minimum is 1 USDC. A fast withdrawal sends USDC to Arbitrum with a 4 USDC minimum. The docs do not publish the fee for either route, but the withdrawal screen shows it before you confirm.

Axiom

There is no withdrawal step. The Axiom wallet is yours, so leaving means sending SOL or tokens to any address and paying the network fee, or importing the recovery phrase into Phantom, Solflare, or Rabby, which Axiom's own signup guide recommends so you always have direct access. Axiom publishes no withdrawal fee of its own. Perps collateral comes back by converting USDC on Hyperliquid to USDC on Solana from the wallet menu, in about five minutes. The axiSOL staking pool charges 0.1% on withdrawals, and yield balances at Marginfi are advertised as instantly withdrawable.

Lighter

Joining through a referral link rebates the Premium trading fees you pay in your first week, on up to $10M of volume, paid out weekly. A Standard account pays no trading fee, so the benefit only matters if you opt into Premium. Referrers earn 10% to 30% of their referred users' fees. Rebates are discretionary, and the code cannot be changed after sign-up. No ChainScouter code is active.

Axiom

Signing up through another user's link takes 10% off trading fees on every trade. The referrer earns 30% of Axiom's net fee on trades by the people they referred directly, 3% on the next level, and 2% on the level after that, on Solana, BNB Chain, and Ethereum trading, with some tokens excluded. Trading itself earns SOL cashback by tier and points toward a leaderboard. The Terms let Axiom change, pause, or withhold rewards before they are claimed. No ChainScouter code is active.

Lighter

The web app at app.lighter.xyz is the main interface. Lighter also publishes its own Lighter Mobile app for iOS and Android, linked from the official site. Unified Trading Accounts can only be enabled on the web for now.

Axiom

Axiom is a browser terminal at axiom.trade built for a desktop screen: a chart with the order box beside it, one-click and hotkey buys and sells, limit orders you can drag on the chart, the Pulse feed of new launches and migrations, a wallet tracker, an X account monitor, several wallets under one login, and a Perpetuals tab. You sign in with an email code, Google, or Phantom plus a password. The site ships a web manifest, so on a phone it installs to the home screen as an app. No native iOS or Android app is documented, and Axiom's site links to no app store listing. Support runs through a Discord ticket channel and the X account.